


Displacement

by I Am Your Spy (GroteskBurlesque)



Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: Espionage, F/M, Fix-It, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-09
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-03-02 22:06:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 42,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13327332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GroteskBurlesque/pseuds/I%20Am%20Your%20Spy
Summary: Giles and Zelda continue, in the space that Elisa left behind.





	1. A Dream of Life

_“Oh,” he says, “it’s you.”_

_The start that the ancient man in the hospital bed gives at your appearance is not the one you are accustomed to seeing. Immediately contrite, he rasps out with what little air remains in his lungs, “Not that I am not, of course, happy to see you, my dear boy.”_

_This too, he seems to realize, may be a miscalculation; he fumbles at the last word, his reed-thin voice unsteady. You nod, and he appears reassured. The distinction matters little to you, regardless. You can barely hear him over the record that crackles Carmen McRae’s “Dream of Life” softly from the corner._

_“I thought it might be_ him _at the end.” His eyelids are creased paper. A slow blink. You know it’s possible, but your mind still marvels at how something so dried out can still move. “Perhaps it’s not quite the end, yet. You can breathe in that thing?”_

_You can breathe as well as a man with days, perhaps hours, to live. The air in the hospice room is full of static and dust that irritates what little of your skin is exposed. This is the first time you’ve had to visit him here; before, he would come to you. It is not dark enough in here. You do not sit._

_“I’m not sure if I have any stories left for you,” he says, still apologetic. “Besides, you can ask them. They_ are _still—“ Another cough. “How long do gods live, I wonder? How long do mermaids?”_

_Longer than men do. They are well. You will hear their stories, in time. You’ve heard many of his before, told in words, in rambling fits and starts above the waves that crash against the rotting wood of the pier, but there are stories that one tells to children, and stories one tells on one’s deathbed, and these are not always the same._

_“You want to hear the juicy stuff? Sex? Treason? All of the above?” Both of you can manage an approximation of laughter. Even the shadowy figure keeping vigil in the corner of the room chuckles a little. You have to admit you didn’t think him capable of it. Not because of the facial scarring, the misaligned jaw; you’ve heard him speak before. But all three of you are accustomed to silence._

_You think of your mother, as they knew her, with her painful high heeled shoes and her starchy cleaner’s uniform, mute and landlocked, and know that the stories he has to tell of her are anemic, wilting, compared to her life after. This is not what you ask; she can tell you the rest herself._

_You don’t need to tell him; you’ve known each other long enough to read each other’s faces. What you ask from him is not for you, but a final gift, for her._

_“Ask me.”_

_A life, in its full completion, is not a fairy tale. There is no obvious narrative thread, no point where the things you know end and the things he knows that you do not begin. You can simply gather, like opening your mouth in a school of minnows, breathe in what you can, let the rest escape. But someone must start, and so you sign first._  

How did you know Elisa was alive?

 

* * *

 

For days, weeks, later, Giles drives down to the docks.

It rains almost constantly afterwards, but on those rare days when it doesn’t, he takes a sketchpad and draws the surface of the water. There were years when he didn’t bother to leave his studio to draw, and years when he didn’t need to. Models were more than willing to come to him. And eventually he learned the shape of objects from memory, how to make a kitchen inviting, a smile genuine, with only the barest of references. He has forgotten what wildness is like, how the surface texture is different each time, sometimes ripples, sometimes violent waves, how the light can change the water from emerald to muddy black in a heartbeat. With each pass of the charcoal over paper, he reclaims something lost to years of drawing apron-clad housewives and stiff businessmen in ties. He lets himself grieve and rage through the Conté stick the way he can’t through tears—since Elisa, he has felt like every drop of water in his body has evaporated—or through screams that would give Mr. Arzoumanian a conniption through the inadequately soundproofed floors and walls. 

But mostly he draws the bubbles, the exhalations of creatures moving beneath the surface, the splashes made by gulls diving for fish, the displacement of oxygen in water.

He remembers, intimately, every raindrop that fell that night, every spasm and dance of wave, every word spoken and not. He knows for certain now that in a storm, the movement of a fish below water is undetectable, but the movement of a man is not. He knows there was first one set of lungs, or gills, or both, breathing below the canal, and then there were two. And so he knows that, against all reason, and despite her blood staining the ground where he now stands for hours at a time, because he knows water, Giles knows that Elisa is alive. 

Giles talks to her, though only at night, and only when he can be certain he wasn’t followed. He imagines he is followed much of the time now. He still expects to be arrested, interrogated. Disappeared, like poor Dr. Hoffstetler, who hasn’t been seen since that night. Giles has committed treason. He has collaborated with Soviet spies. He has abetted murder. For weeks later, he sketches at the docks and talks to a dead woman, but he does so looking over his shoulder, waiting for the end.

_(“To think that the end wouldn’t come for another thirty years! And from something as mundane as old age, the body simply announcing the completion of its work.”_

_But you notice that he always keeps one eye on the door.)_

Eventually Zelda joins him, when she can, and when she can no longer bear the isolation with which her secret burdens her. Zelda talks, and Giles listens, and neither speak of their scars.


	2. Wonderful Schemes From Nowhere

Zelda’s life barely skips a beat.

She can’t afford the luxury of the grief that wants to pick at her, to devour her from the margins, from her bunched and swollen feet to her fingers, wrinkled and peeling from chemical exposure. Zelda, instead, trudges back to work. She mops the floors and changes the overflowing garbage cans. She scrubs yellow, sticky piss from improbable locations in the men’s bathroom. When she marvels at the aim, or lack thereof, of these vaunted geniuses, she does so aloud, but alone.

Zelda goes back to her Brewster, and butters his toast on both sides the way he insists, and he scowls all the same, never moving from his chair. She waits until he is asleep to touch herself so that he doesn’t grumble about that too, and when, at last, she drifts to sleep, she dreams of drowning in the ocean.

Zelda does not sneak cigarettes from Duane and the other kitchen workers. The loading dock is empty, except for when the vehicles are actually being unloaded, and there are additional security patrols. She finds debris, a bit of twisted teal, on the pavement. At first she thinks that Duane has gone too, like Elisa, like Hoffstetler, like Strickland (whose death is never remarked upon for the embarrassment it might potentially cause the government, and so, accordingly, she is free to once again fall beneath notice or consequence), but no, the meatloaf in the cafeteria is still unmistakably terrible and unmistakably his, and she finally deduces that they’ve found another blind spot, and so Zelda goes searching until she finds the upturned camera in the boiler room.

Some of the men don’t want her there. They know that she’s somehow responsible for the loss of their sanctuary in the loading dock, but Duane says, no, none of that was Zelda’s fault, it was all the silent girl, and the scientist who’s maybe a Russian spy, and he’s been missing Zelda these past few days, so if they’ve got a problem with her, they can take it up with him. Duane holds out a cigarette between two long fingers and says, “just one, come on girl, have one on me.” Her chest tightens, and she tells herself the prickling heat is from the smoke in her lungs.

That night, it’s not the ocean behind her eyelids as her hand slides between her legs, and Brewster’s snoring covers her gasps.

Zelda takes the bus to the docks, sometimes to meet Giles, but usually on her own. She weeps for Elisa, but she makes damned well sure there’s no one around to hear it.

 

* * *

 

Duane asks her if she wants to get a milkshake with her, and she blushes and stammers and says she’s a married woman, and he says fine, but his eyes are on her too long, and she tries to recall if the creature ever laid hands on her the way he did Giles and aged her backwards, if the butterflies in her stomach are a second springtime of adolescence, so giddy does she feel at the low rumble of his voice.

Giles invites her to join him for a slice of pie, but they can’t find a place that will allow a black woman and a white man old enough to be her father to sit at a booth together, so instead he invites her over to his apartment above the movie theater. Neither of them realize what a bad idea this is until she sees the vacancy notice beside the entrance to the theater, hears the swell of the Glenn Miller Orchestra on Giles’ record player, Elisa’s door ajar and her hardwood floor damaged from the flooding, and all those drawings pinned to his easel, Elisa and the creature but most of all the surface of the water where she sank, the shading steady at first, shakier as the weather turned colder, and she falls into his arms, sobbing, no space between them but that of Elisa’s absence, while the two surviving cats twine around their ankles. 

Duane says, “Your Brewster don’t know what a lucky man he is,” and Giles says, later on, “You should move into Elisa’s apartment,” and instead Zelda hangs in suspension, moving through the thick fog of her days.

It might have been like that forever, had her watch not broken.

 

* * *

 

See, you need a watch so that you know the MPs’ shifts, when you’re allowed slide into the cracks beneath notice, and she actually realizes she’s off by a minute or two as she nears the boiler room, but she hears men’s voices, Duane’s voice, low in conspiracy, and it’s too late to disguise the clack of her cursed heels on the concrete. She’s been heard. 

Zelda freezes. The men freeze. Only Duane looks undisturbed.

“How much did you hear?” Lou asks. 

“Not a thing,” Zelda says, banging with the flat of her palm on the thick metal of the door to demonstrate how solid, how soundproofed it is. The thump echoes through the boiler room. She curses her broken watch and how all the other clocks in this building are always a slightly different time.

“Bullshit.”

“Leave her alone,” Duane says. “It’s well past time we talked to her anyway.”

“She got our spot at the loading docks taken away.” Hernando spits. “Girl can’t keep her trap shut.”

Zelda’s done nothing _but_ keep secrets, even at gunpoint. But she keeps her lips pressed tightly together,

“Think about it,” Duane says. “All them cleaning ladies. I bet you know all their names, right Zelda? Prob’ly got phone numbers, addresses? And they’ll listen to her.”   

“The _cleaning ladies?_ ” Lou says, and the others scoff. “Fine revolution that’s gonna be.” 

It doesn’t take her long to catch on. “You’ve been _plotting_ ,” Zelda says. “Every cigarette break. That’s why you’re always already here, when—”

“You gonna tell on us?” Duane asks her, in that soft, mocking tone that tells her he knows damn well that she won’t.

“Lord Almighty!” Zelda sighs. “Why’re the only decent men around this place some goddamn _Communists_?” 

Hernando starts to protest and Duane just moves a little closer to her, and she can smell him, tobacco and onions from the kitchen and the salt of his skin, the good, honest sweat from hard work, not like Brewster who mostly just smells of booze. “You think I’m decent?” he murmurs, and some of the guys laugh. “She won’t tell no one,” Duane declares. “Not until it’s time to. She kept that deaf girl’s secret long enough, didn’t she?”

“Mute,” Zelda whispers, “She wasn’t deaf, she was mute, she could hear just fine.”

“ _Communists_ ,” Duane says, as if it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard.

“Whatever you’re planning,” Zelda says. “It’s gonna hurt them government freaks and soldiers and them lab coats who can’t aim when they piss?”

“It ain’t gonna make them happy, that’s for sure.” 

Her fists tighten against her sides. For the first time since Elisa disappeared beneath the water, she can breathe freely.

“Those bastards took away my best friend,” she says. “Count me the fuck in.”


	3. I Don’t Want To Set the World On Fire

The men trust Zelda after that, or at least if they have reservations about her, Duane makes certain they never show it when she’s around. She’s allowed to time her breaks two minutes earlier, so it’s not just kitchen gossip she hears but practical talk, shop talk, all about what’s been happening in Detroit and Dr. King and what the fellow from CORE had said, who’s likely to be sympathetic to a walkout, who isn’t. Turns out the reason Duane’s cooking is so terrible is that he lied about having any sort of kitchen experience, and he’s only here as what they call a salt, to pass information between the outside organizers, determined to strike a mortal blow to segregation and the military-industrial complex, and the laborers working the cafeteria and laundry, who’d just like a 30-cent pay raise, please-and-thanks, sir.

Of course, the workers _do_ gossip—organizing a walkout is a process that moves like molasses under the best of circumstances, and even more so in a government facility that requires top-level military clearance with a workforce well below the radar of any sort of respectable, read _skilled and white_ , trade union—and besides which, Duane insists that they all need to trust each other. Not to mention that while the appearance and disappearance of the Asset was officially hushed up and they’ve all signed NDAs, no one can pretend that nothing happened. A man had his _fingers_ bit clean off, after all, and a security guard murdered, and no shortage of fuss and blood and piss to mop ever since they wheeled that capsule into the laboratory.

“They say that Strickland fellow went mad,” Hernando’s saying. “Some kinda shooting spree, maybe the infection made him go sick in the head. Had to be taken out by the police.” He makes a finger gun, and Zelda nods along even she knows Strickland didn’t go out like that, and was one crazy mean son-of-a-bitch well before his fingers went gangrenous.

“And that scientist, they say _he_ was some Commie spy…”

“Nah,” Yolanda—who’s joined them, though she keeps her distance from Zelda. “I hear it’s Strickland who was the spy. That’s why—” She makes a throat-slitting gesture, a strangled, _hhhk-hhhk_. Zelda tries not to think of Strickland, of his blackened fingers hitting her tiled floor, of him coughing his last into a pool of blood at the docks. Goddamn bastard deserved every second of agony he suffered, and she won’t be the one to mourn his timely exit from this earth, but that doesn’t shake the horror from the back of her skull.

Duane shakes his head. “Definitely the scientist. My brother-in-law, he’s an orderly at Mercy, and he says they brought him in the night Strickland got—” He imitates Yolanda’s throat-slitting, to some amusement. “And he’s in a coma, and there’s army guys crawlin’ all over the place.”

“Oh.” Zelda speaks for the first time. “You sure of that, Duane?”

Duane is sure of it, absolutely, no question it’s him. And that’s how she finds out that Hoffstetler is alive.

 

* * *

 

 _If the man in the shadows reacts to his mention in this story, you are not well versed enough in human expressions to tell. Of course, that hasn’t been his name for over two decades, and wasn’t his name to begin with. You_ do _recognize the look on Giles’ face for what it is. For a moment, the dying man looks almost young again._

_“It was always life and death with us, wasn’t it, Dima?” Giles muses. “Who’d have thought either of us would get to go out so prosaically?”_

 

* * *

 

“We have to do something.”

It’s the boldest Zelda’s ever heard him; he doesn’t so much as stutter over a syllable. More has changed in him than just the new thatch of hair on his head, now so thick that you can barely see the scalp beneath. There’s a restlessness to him now, a momentum forward. She can see it in his posture when he waits at the docks for Elisa to surface from the water, fighting every impulse to dive in hopes of retrieving her. Standing still is no longer an option, but he hasn’t had a direction, not until now.

“They’ll be watchin’ him harder than they watched Elisa’s creature,” Zelda counters, even if she agrees with him. Elisa’s hands, telling her what truths reside in the scientist’s heart, are proof enough that they have to do what they can. “Just the two of us, up against all that?” She pauses. “Three, if…” 

“This Duane of yours. You trust him?”

“He doesn’t like Hoyt or Fleming or any of them army boys at OCCAM anymore than I do.” She shrugs. “ _He_ trusts _me_ , I guess.”

So that’s that, and they make a solemn pact to sneak into a hospital and steal a comatose Russian spy out from under the noses of the US military, because when you’ve seen the dead rise and the bioluminescent glow of a river god’s scales, what is there really left to fear?

 

* * *

 

As it turns out, the list of things for Giles to fear is substantial.

They have no time to plan. Duane’s brother-in-law, Jeremiah, doesn’t know when the MPs will decide that it’s safe to move Hoffstetler to a more secure location. It’s probably not safe to move him period, but given that the alternatives lie somewhere along the spectrum between a life imprisonment and deportation to a Siberian gulag, they’re not left with much of a choice. 

A phone call or two, uniforms stolen, the van hastily altered yet again, and Giles is nervously wishing that he could be just the getaway driver. A busy hospital is easier to infiltrate than a government laboratory, and Hoffstetler’s room is obvious enough, with its contingent of armed guards. But neither he or Zelda want to put Duane or Jeremiah in danger for being foolish enough to help them, and while Zelda can pose convincingly as a cleaning lady, he’s the only one among them that might pass as a doctor. He tugs at his newly grown forelock of hair to keep his fingers away from the ID he’s forged, lest he wear away the freshly painted ink.

“You gonna go bald again,” Zelda tuts, and he envies her ability to pretend she isn’t as nervous as he is. “All that new hair, it’s gonna fall right back out.”

The primitive, reptilian core of his brain urges him to run. He doesn’t know this man, not really. There’s still time to crawl back under the comforting, if threadbare, blanket of his ordinary life. He could grab Zelda’s arm where she pushes a cart laden with cleaning supplies several feet ahead of him, and pull her back, and they could be watching old musicals in his apartment within the hour. 

Though his legs are shaking under his stolen white coat, he keeps moving, propelled onwards by the memory of Hoffstetler stabbing a syringe into the neck of a man about to kill him. 

There are two guards in front of the private room. He flashes his forged ID. They barely glance at it, and he lets himself in, Zelda worrying a spot across the hall with her mop, her eyes on him through the window in the door.

Hoffstetler is lying on a wheeled hospital bed. The IV bag hanging from the pole above him sways like a corpse on the gallows. The thin blanket, folded crisply over his body, indicates that he hasn’t so much as stirred. The sight of him, bone-white skin, lips parted and broken beside the white square of gauze covering half of his face, is horrifyingly alien, a waxworks grotesquery.

 _He’s going to die if he’s moved,_ Giles thinks. _He might never even wake up._  

_He’s going to die if he’s not moved._

He tells himself it’s the same as with the creature. He has no idea how to keep this fragile stranger alive any more than Elisa knew how to save her captive river god, but he knows what to do; stand straight, act like he belongs, keep moving. Except this time there’s no sympathetic insider to come to his rescue when he fails. He moves around to the top of the bed, close enough to hear the whistle of breath through Hoffstetler’s mouth, tests the strength it will take to push it down the corridor, towards the pack of the building where Duane is waiting in the van.

“We doing this or not?” Jeremiah asks from the door, impatient. Giles startles; he hadn’t noticed the other man standing there. He swallows, nods. Elisa is signing, frantically, _if we don’t do something, neither are we,_ pleading for her monster’s life. Jeremiah wheels the bed through the door without discussion or ceremony, and the guards immediately snap to attention, demanding to know where he’s going with the prisoner. 

“Um, x-ray?” Giles stammers. Jeremiah just keeps pushing; one of the guards moves to block him, while the other holds up a hand to Giles.

“I haven’t seen you before.”

“Yes, I’m, er. New.” He thrusts the ID badge in front of the soldier’s nose like a talisman. “I was told, to—” He reaches for his clipboard, but the other guard, having apparently recognized Jeremiah as a familiar face, waves them on with a bored expression. Once they’re around the corner, he and Jeremiah exchange glances, waiting for Zelda to catch up with them. 

“Keep going down the hall,” Jeremiah says, “turn left at the double doors, then right again. Don’t talk to anyone if you don’t need to. You’re terrible at this.”

“Thank you?” Giles grips the steel bar at the end of the bed and shoves it ahead of him. Elisa could have done this, with her dancer-thin arms and wobbly heels; he strains at the unexpected resistance, but he keeps moving, certain that if he pauses to catch his breath, the soldiers will descend on them.

He hears them coming when they’re almost at the end of the hall, turns back, heart convulsed in panicked syncopations, to see Zelda frozen. Slowly, she raises her hands. Signs, “ _Run.”_

Giles pushes the bed through the doors in enough time to see Zelda upend a pail of soapy water from her cart onto the floor and slide her mop across it. He hears hear angrily scolding a soldier for nearly slipping where she’s just cleaned, goddamn it, pardon my language _sir_ but some of us got _jobs_ to do around here and can’t just spend all day lollygagging around. Almost smiles at her tenacity as he sees Duane pull up in the van.

“Where’s Zelda?”

“Right here.” She’s panting, carrying her shoes in her hands, her stockings already torn. “Had to dump the cart and run. We gotta go, fast.” 

He and Duane get Hoffstetler into the van. It’s trickier than he expects; the scientist is small, but he’s a dead weight, and an abstract part of his brain decides that it’s important to keep the IV in and above him, but he can’t see how, and he ends up just slinging it over the back seat and hoping for the best.

He ends up slumped against the seat with Hoffstetler in his arms, braced against him to lessen the impact of Duane’s attempt to maneuver the van over a row of speed bumps. The scientist’s head lolls against his shoulder and he presses his face into the man’s dark hair, trembling violently.

“He alive back there?” Zelda asks, twisting in her seat.

The blood is pounding too hard in his ears for him to hear a heartbeat, but he presses two fingers to Hoffstetler’s neck and feels a pulse that he’s mostly sure isn’t his own. There’s already blood on the bandage covering his face; he’s wrapped in a sheet and Giles can’t see if he’s injured anywhere else, but that alone looks bad. People don’t survive being shot in the head, how on Earth is he even still breathing?

“Hey.” Zelda’s hand on his shoulder shakes him out of his spell. “Hey, they’re gonna think it was the Russians. We got away. Again.”

Duane asks, “What in fuck you get yourself into, Zelda?” 

 _Well,_ Giles thinks, as she tries, and fails, to explain. _Now we all have our secrets._


	4. East of the Sun

Mr. Arzoumanian shows a young couple around Elisa’s apartment. He’s almost apologetic as Giles (arms full of grocery bags, stuffed with items that might have aroused suspicion if anyone cared to look) brushes past him in the hallway. Giles understands; the theater is struggling, and he can’t afford to let one of the apartments, no matter how cursed, lie vacant. The girl is pregnant, and both of them are shabbily dressed. Still, he sees her cringe at the smell that lingers in the walls and floorboards. Mr. Arzoumanian has scrubbed, on his hands and knees, but the rot remains where they didn’t drain the water fast enough, the salty, fishy scent has seeped into the wood, and his frown tightens as the young man shakes his head and the couple hurry down the stairs.

Giles asks him if he would consider renting to a young Negro woman, a hard worker with a steady job, and Mr. Arzoumanian says that this is a respectable building, for respectable people.

Giles stutters an apology and retreats into his own apartment, where a traitor to two empires lies on his Murphy bed, unmoving.

 

* * *

 

The first thing they do at OCCAM is switch up the shifts.

Zelda is pretty sure Fleming doesn’t know what goes on in the boiler room, or who’s behind it, but he’s not half as stupid as he looks and he must know that _something_ is stirring. The next thing she knows, after ten years on the graveyard shift, she’s scheduled all over the damned place.

At first she thinks it’s useful; she can talk to the girls on day shift about the walkout; it’ll have more impact if it happens when the press can see. But it only takes three days before her equilibrium is thrown into disarray; she can no longer tell morning from evening. She wades through half-dreams, daylight a distant memory. Sometimes she walks in past the doors, the spotlights catching the fog and raindrops, to find the facility almost empty, and she thinks she’s come at the wrong time, and she stands in the echoing corridors, leaning into her cart, imagining that the whole world has quietly left and she’s the last woman on earth, alone within her poured concrete prison.

“Where’s your little shadow?” one of the women, who hasn’t heard about what happened to Elisa, asks her, and Zelda keeps her composure until she can reach the women’s washroom, where she holds her head in her hands and weeps.

( _“She didn’t believe me, you know. Not back then. She thought it was a story I made up, for both of us, so that our heartbreak would not kill us.”_ ) 

The next thing they do is interrogate her. About Elisa, a little, and Hoffstetler, a lot. Sure, they interrogate everyone, but Fleming waits until she’s done several oddly spaced shifts in a row, and makes sure he’s in the office when he talks to her. She feigns ignorance, even stupidity, and feels like an amputee without Elisa by her side. She doesn’t let slip that the target of their interest is only a bus ride away, unable to flee if they managed to find him. They still think it was the Russians that broke him out of hospital, Zelda’s still below notice, and the battlefield on which she faces Fleming, that of stoic, hard denial, is one she’s all too familiar with.

She misses Duane most of all. They’re scheduled opposite each other more often than not (which means that the cafeteria food is almost palatable, not that it’s any substitute) and she sees him only in passing, leaving the facility as she picks her way down the steps of the bus. They slip messages back and forth, scrawled on napkins or whispered as they pass each other. He can’t call the house and she doesn’t dare arouse Brewster’s suspicions, not after what happened last time. Damn man don’t talk but he’s sure as hell listening in on every word she says in that house. Duane and Lou and the other organizers keep their heads down, figuring if they can just hold out long enough, Fleming’s suspicions will fall elsewhere.

At home, Brewster grunts at her, and farts, and once, tries clumsily to paw her as she’s trying to sleep. She stands up, wraps her nightgown around herself, and says, in a voice stronger than she feels, “I’m going out.”

She takes the night bus to the theater, and she climbs those stairs, her feet and legs heavy as OCCAM's cement walls, Elisa’s apartment still vacant, still smelling of him, and of her, and she lies down on Elisa’s moldy couch and looks up at the cracks in the ceiling.

She falls asleep like that, no surprise given her schedule, and would have slept right through her shift had she not woken to an unholy commotion next door.

 

* * *

 

Dimitri opens his eyes and thinks for a moment that he’s back in Moscow, in his shared dorm at the university. He can’t see much more than blurry shapes, but it’s something in the quality of the light, the way dust specks dance, haloed in his myopic vision, reminding him of his student days and the casual untidiness of men who live too much in their heads to remember to run a rag over the furniture now and then. It’s the sense of strangeness, of being in a place that is familiar but is not, and will never be, his family’s home in Minsk, long crumbled beneath German bombs.

Or perhaps it’s the smell of old books, the narrow, sagging mattress, a sensibility out of step with time. He can just barely imagine a scenario where the extraction wasn’t a ruse, where the mission wasn’t bungled, where he didn’t betray and wasn’t betrayed in kind. 

But Dimitri has been in this capitalist hellhole for a decade, and hasn’t been home for even longer. The pain that rushes up to meet him like an old friend tells him that he hasn’t escaped. He is still on fire, bleeding out into a sand pile with Strickland shouting in his face.

He’s instantly on the alert, reaching for his gun. There’s no pistol, no wallet, no cigarettes, no clever, deadly weapon supplied by Mihalkov as a last resort. He tries to get up but a wave of pain slams into his gut. He hasn’t managed to move an inch, and he’s abandoned, blinded, wounded, and helpless behind enemy lines. He screams, and one side of his face lights up in agony, and he determines that he’s completely and utterly fucked. 

Even panic-stricken and in pain, he’s still a man of science, and a small, detached part of his brain starts evaluating his present circumstances. He’s not in a hospital, and he’s not in a prison cell, so what’s left? There’s—to his disgust and embarrassment, a bedpan, thankfully empty—and someone has cared enough to wrap a pile of blankets around him. A safehouse, could his would-be assassin have been acting against Mihalkov’s orders? Did Moscow—

—no. Moscow doesn’t make mistakes, therefore Moscow doesn’t change its orders. That much is certain. There’s a noise, and something butts up against the side of his head, in the blind spot where the gauze on his face masks his vision completely. Purrs. He manages to turn his head enough to see two large green eyes staring back. 

“ _Kitya,_ ” he whispers, reaching out his fingers to scratch the top of the cat’s head. Encouraged, it mews at him, and he forgets, for a second or two, to be frightened.

“Lilly!”

He hears a crash, and the blurred movement from the corner of his eye resolves itself into a man, careening towards him. His muscles, though on the verge of atrophy from his long immobilization, go into fight-or-flight mode before he can remind them that his only real option is lying still. Even the smallest motion, his weakened body’s pathetic attempts to curl into a defensive position, sends an aftershock through his core like a punch, and he collapses, tears springing to his eyes.

“Dr. Hoffstetler?” The man’s voice is familiar, somehow, but in his terror he can’t place it. “I, er, I didn’t realize you were awake.” There’s a hand on his shoulder now. It’s been so long since anyone touched him that it’s all he can do not to weep from gratitude.

A woman’s voice, soft but authoritative: “His name’s Dimitri.”

Zelda. The man, then, is Elisa’s friend, the driver. He blinks rapidly, squints to focus on the face above him.

“Giles Dupont,” the man says. Dimitri wonders if he knew that before. “And I see you’ve already met Lilly. You’re in my apartment. You’re safe now.”

“I doubt that very much.” He can barely get the words out; the side of his jaw aches. He tests the source of the pain with his tongue. There’s a mass of stitches there, between the hardening of destroyed flesh into scar tissue. He’s missing three teeth. It’s a small loss, but sharp, another part of him that’s been chipped away, along with his name, his career, his homeland. “Thank you.”

“You shouldn’t talk,” Zelda says. “You got shot. In the _face._ ”

“Water,” he manages. “Please?”

Someone brings him a glass. It hurts to drink, and it hurts to swallow, and he feels the liquid’s passage through each inch of his reconstructed digestive tract. A wave of dizziness washes over him and he almost passes out, but he needs to know. “The Asset?”

“He’s free,” Giles says. “Elisa is…with him.” There’s hesitation; glances between them that he can see even through his blurry vision. They’re keeping secrets from him, but he’s too exhausted to question why, and his jaw aches too badly to talk. “Strickland’s dead. He—he was the one who shot you?”

Dimitri shakes his head. _Just tortured me and left me for dead_ are more syllables than he can manage. As far as Mihalkov is concerned, he’s dead—if Mihalkov is even alive himself—and if Strickland is dead too, maybe he actually is safe for the time being. It seems inconceivable; he’s lived in an ever-present state of terror for most of his life, and that he should find even a temporary respite here, in a cluttered American apartment, barely able to keep his head up enough to sip from the glass Zelda holds to his lips, beggars belief.

“I need to go,” she says. “My shift…” She reaches down and squeezes his hand. “I’ll come back when I can. You rest up, hon. Don’t let this old man keep you talkin’ all day long.”

He hears her leave, and Giles clears his throat awkwardly once or twice. He bends over, scratches the cat under her chin. “Are you…” he tries, then, “Can I? That is, do you have family? Someone, who…”

“No,” Dimitri says. There are two people he knows in the entire world who don’t want him dead, and one’s just left the room.

“I’m sorry,” Giles says. “Me too. Well, Zelda, I suppose, now. Do you like music?”

Dimitri nods. Who doesn’t like music? He takes over stroking Lilly while Giles hastily gets up to put a record on. He doesn’t recognize the song, one of those schmaltzy, sentimental tunes that Americans seem so fond of. He leans back against the pillows, curls his arm around the cat, and slides into sleep before Giles returns.


	5. Alone Together

Giles fusses around the apartment, rearranging canvasses that he will never finish, picking up his sketchbook half a dozen times and putting it down again. Before his houseguest regained consciousness, he’d stepped out the door to pick up supplies, to drive down to the docks—once, and he’d shivered in the wind for a minute or two before retreating to the safety of his van—to venture into the theater and fall asleep to a Bible movie. But now that Hoffstetler—Dimitri—is back in the world of the living, he can’t move far from the Murphy bed. What if he wakes, Giles thinks, and finds himself alone?

He doesn’t question why he finds this thought so viscerally appalling.

He’s watching television when he hears Dimitri stir again. It’s late afternoon. He has an internal clock that insists he should be painting, while the light is still good, even when he hasn’t had any work for months.

Dimitri is staring at him from the bed, as are the cats. They have both betrayed Giles for him now; Snowflake is warier after her brush with death and stays at the edge of the bed by his feet, but Lilly has, it seems, fallen completely in love and is folded into a prim loaf at his side, alert and watchful. Giles is momentarily grateful that this visitor is more compatible with his cats than his last one.

He doesn’t know what to say, precisely, and having seen how much pain it caused Dimitri to speak, he can’t exactly encourage a conversation.

“Can I get you anything?” he asks. “You must be hungry. And…something for the pain, I imagine?”

Dimitri nods, and Giles is relieved to have something to do with his hands. That Dimitri is alive at all is Zelda’s doing; the thin chicken broth they’ve been pouring down the wounded man’s throat is from her kitchen, the painkillers he shakily opens have been stolen from Brewster at great risk to her strained marriage. Giles, for his part, has no idea how to care for another human being, let alone one in such precarious a condition as his new guest. He wishes Zelda were here, to fill in the silence and to tell him what to do. 

Still, he gamely pulls his stool to the bedside and gives Dimitri two of the little pink pills that Brewster takes for his back, holds the glass of water to his lips and tries not to cringe at how much even this small action hurts him. He gives the man a few minutes to recover before bringing over the soup. Dimitri manages to swallow all of a few spoonfuls before he’s fighting back tears again, and Giles puts the bowl to one side and murmurs that they can try again later, not to push it while he’s still so weak.

“Tell me what happened.” Dimitri says.

He doesn’t know how to start. He hasn’t spoken of that night to anyone but Zelda, who witnessed some of it herself. He finds himself interrupting his own story, _he ate my cat,_ and _he grew my hair back_ interspersed with _Strickland shot Elisa and the creature brought her back to life._

“I’m sorry,” Dimitri says, when he’s at last run out of words. “About your cat.” He pats Lilly for good measure.

“You don’t believe me about Elisa.”

“In my experience,” Dimitri tells him, “we seldom get the ending we deserve.”

“I can prove it—” Giles starts to get up, ready to rush to get his water studies, before he remembers that Dimitri can’t see anything. Dimitri’s hand snakes out and grabs his wrist.

“Please.” His voice is strained, desolate. Giles aches for him. There’s a spark of familiarity there, a man alone in the world, hiding what he is. “Just stay. Please.”

Giles sits back down. He puts his hand over Dimitri’s, expecting the other man to pull away in disgust. When he doesn’t, Giles rubs little circles over his knuckles with his thumb. 

“I could read to you,” Giles offers.

It’s the right thing to say, apparently; Dimitri seems to come a little more alive at the prospect. However he managed to be a deep-cover spy in a top-secret US military facility, Giles has no idea. His face barely changes in expression, but his eyes give everything away.

Giles is released for long enough to fumble through his bookshelf, and lands on a thick volume of Neruda’s poems in translation, which he lets fall open as he takes his place by the bed.

He hasn’t read aloud in years, and he fumbles over the first lines, the mermaid’s humiliation at the hands of a tavern full of drunks, and nearly regrets his choice of poem.

 

_“She did not speak because she had no speech._

_Her eyes were the colour of distant love,_

_her twin arms were made of white topaz._

_Her lips moved, silent, in a coral light,_

_and suddenly she went out by that door._

_Entering the river she was cleaned,_

_shining like a white stone in the rain,_

_and without looking back she swam again_

_swam towards emptiness, swam towards death.”_

 

Dimitri is quiet, his eyes half-closed, either an appreciative audience or a very tired one. After a few more poems, Giles thinks he’s fallen asleep again, and he closes the book only to hear the rustle of the bed sheets. “You are very kind,” Dimitri says. 

“You did save my life.”

“Still. I put you in danger, being here.”

“I’m an old man,” Giles says, with more courage than he feels. “The worst they can do is kill me.”

Dimitri makes a sound that might have almost been a laugh if his maimed mouth had allowed it. “Not so old as when we first met,” he replies, ensuring that for the remainder of his days, Giles would not hesitate to do anything Dimitri asked of him. 

( _The man in the shadows says, amused, “Bullshit. When in your life have you ever listened to me?”_

_“Always,” Giles replies. “I was devoted to you, heart and soul, from that moment forward.”_

_“Maybe_ you _remember it like that, darling. As I recall, you couldn’t even tell I was flirting with you.”_

_“Who’s telling this story, anyway?”)_

“Where would they have gone?” Dimitri asks. “If they had lived?”

He doesn’t insist that they _did_ live, that they’re safe under the waves, free at last from the two governments hell-bent on seeing them dead. He doesn’t, though he wants to, wants Dimitri to know that all of his suffering is not in vain, that he’s done the most incredible thing Giles has ever seen a person do for another, for a person most wouldn’t even recognize as _human_. Dimitri doesn’t believe him, and that’s _fine,_ perhaps he will in time, but now he merely wants a possibility, a road out of the fate he’d envisioned.

“New York,” Giles says without hesitation. “She’d…she’d have loved Broadway. Would that work, would there be enough salt...?”

Dimitri regards him for a beat. He yawns, and Giles feels a stab of guilt for keeping him awake when he should be conserving his strength.

“This is a fantasy, Giles,” he says. “They can go dancing in the middle of Times Square, for all it matters. I would like to imagine it that way, instead. It is a beautiful gift, to have a mind that conjures a future in which they are no longer so lonely.”

He’s never thought of it that way, so he just nods, and bites down the insistence that his ending for them is no less realistic than Dimitri’s. Let him think what he will; Giles knows that the mermaid is free at the end, that perhaps some day, he will be too.

 

* * *

 

Duane finds Zelda near the end of her shift, just as she’s bent over a urinal in the men’s room, one hand pressed to the small of her back, feet swollen and raw. She couldn’t look less attractive if she tried, and there is he, right on cue, after she hasn’t seen him in days, and isn’t that just like a man? 

“We’re meeting,” he whispers, his long body folding to bring his lips close to her ear. “Friday at 9 at the Arch Social Club. Spread the word.”

“Well, hello to you too.”

“You’ll be there?” He has the preacher’s gift of making it sound like her presence, and hers alone, is vital to him and God both.

“They keep switching up my shift like this, I don’t know where I am in an hour, let alone in three nights.” She sighs. “’Course I’ll be there, Duane. I’m in it as much as you are now.”

He beams, and she could swear his wide, white teeth glow in the sulfurous light. “How’s your friend?”

Zelda hisses, “We can’t be talking about that here!” 

“Lou didn’t think you was much of a troublemaker,” Duane says. “But me, I think you got the rest of us beat.” He traces a finger over her cheek, down to the point of her chin. She shivers, gooseflesh prickling her arms. She never could resist a cocksure man.

But it isn’t just his confidence, or his vitality, or his handsomeness—all of which he has in spades. He hadn’t asked her why she was so determined to save Hoffstetler; he’d just gone along with it, trusted her, and drove them out of there in Giles’ van. He had everything to lose, the campaign, his own freedom, and— 

—he hadn’t even questioned it. He’d just done it for her, because she’d asked him to. Brewster wouldn’t so much as get up to do the dishes if she’d begged.

Just like that, she falls in love, as matter-of-factly as she’s ever done anything in her life, and she’d have risen up on her sore feet to kiss him if she hadn’t remembered, right there and then, that she was a married woman, a decent, Christian woman, with no right to walk out on a marriage of ten years, no matter how worthless a husband Brewster might be. She turns on her heels and she flees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Pablo Neruda, “Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks.” From ‘Estravagario’ (1958).](https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/fable-of-the-mermaid-and-the-drunks/)


	6. These Foolish Little Dreams I'm Dreaming

Dimitri is awake for all of a day or so before becoming an intolerable burden on the man who has been generous enough to take him in. 

He can’t help it; infirmity doesn’t agree with him. He’s anxious, unused to lying still, and the constant pain, even with the pills, wears on his nerves. He craves cigarettes. He misses being able to see more than a smear of color and shape. He’s normally fastidious, but he can’t so much as hobble to the bathroom unaccompanied, let alone take a shower. The tipping point comes when his face starts to itch; he reaches up to scratch it, and finds about a week’s worth of stubble growing in along his jaw. Dimitri has been methodical about shaving since puberty. He finds facial hair repulsive (though his position on this has softened in recent days); he imagines his skin erupting and peeling in black, putrid layers from the wound in his cheek.

Poor Giles, who been uprooted from his own bed and has forsaken all semblance of a normal life to nurse him back to health, makes the fatal mistake of asking him what’s wrong, and his long list of grievances bubble up like sewage, ugly and toxic. The brief but unpleasant outburst leaves his mouth stinging and adds a sinking shame to the burn in the pit of his stomach.

Giles stands up and walks out, and for long minutes, Dimitri is convinced that he has driven away his benefactor and is doomed to die, abandoned in the artist’s apartment, to have his corpse eaten by cats. He decides he almost deserves it, and his premonitions of doom are only confirmed when Giles returns, and he sees the glint of a blade in the other man’s hand. 

“Can you sit up?” 

He can’t, not without Giles lifting him to lean against the wall. He grips fistfuls of the bedsheets, trying, and mostly succeeding, to stifle the cry of pain that tries to leak out. Giles puts a hand on his shoulder until he can breathe regularly again, then gently peels back the square of gauze on his cheek.

“Let me know if I’m hurting you,” he murmurs. Dimitri doesn’t think that Giles is capable of such a thing. 

With the careful precision that he once bestowed on his canvases, Giles washes the wound and applies shaving cream to the skin around it. Dimitri feels the tug of the straight razor on the scar tissue, but it’s not painful, exactly, and a relief to feel the mild smart of the soap. It’s oddly intimate, another man tilting his chin to scrape stubble from his face. He hasn’t been this close—Strickland’s torture aside—to another human being in years.

“There.” Giles’ voice is hoarse. “Handsome again.”

Dimitri goes very still.

“I’m sorry,” Giles says. “It’s—er, I didn’t mean…”

“Let me see,” Dimitri says.

Giles hesitates. Fumbles when he reaches for the mirror by his easel and almost drops it, but he brings it, reluctantly, for Dimitri to look at.

His myopia spares him the immediate blow; he has to squint, so he has a general impression before details register. He sees his reflection in soft focus, but it doesn’t disguise the pucker of scar tissue below his cheekbone, raw and ugly, pinched together by a row of black stitches. He knows the surgical scars on his shoulder and abdomen are worse, can feel the agonizing tightness where they sliced his guts open and sewed him shut again, but—assuming he can ever step out from within the confines of Giles’ apartment—it’s his maimed face that the rest of the world will judge him by.

It’s true, he’s never been handsome as such, never put much stock in physical beauty, but there’s a difference between forgettable—a common quality in a scientist, and, after all, a positive one in a spy—and grotesque. 

He takes a measured breath in, trying to steady himself. He’s alive. He’s alive, and Strickland is dead, and Elisa and the Asset are free from OCCAM, whether in life or death, and these strange people who ought to have been his enemies cared enough to rescue him, and he knows he should be grateful. He _is_ grateful, he tells himself that it’s better to be deformed than dead, that all systems bend towards entropy and it is the fate of all flesh to eventually fail, but to his shame, hot tears prickle at his eyes.

Giles takes the mirror from his hands and replaces it next to the easel. Dimitri can make out the shape of him pacing, the light from the window weaving in and out as he moves. At last, apparently having come to some sort of decision, he comes to rest, perched on the edge of the bed.

“I can’t know, not really,” he starts. “But I have some idea of what it is to look in the mirror and see something you don’t recognize.” He places his hand on the uninjured side of Dimitri’s face. His palm is cool against Dimitri’s feverish skin. “At least you don’t have a beard anymore.”

Dimitri laughs weakly, wipes at his eyes. Giles’ fingers brush over his cheekbone, light, with plausible deniability. He flicks white foam from his fingertips.

“Spot of shaving cream,” he says. 

“Thank you,” Dimitri replies.

“I could put on another record,” Giles offers, and Dimitri nods, and neither of them moves.

 

* * *

 

Zelda almost loses her nerve twice before crossing West Saratoga Street, and once as she enters the clubhouse, clutching her handbag to her side, and sees Rev. Thomas from church. Surely, he’s come here to judge all of them, and she’ll be hearing about their sin and rebellion come Sunday, but he merely nods and waves her in, and she wonders how the world got so topsy-turvy and strange all of a sudden. 

The hall is set up with white cloths on the long banquet tables as though it’s a wedding and not a planning meeting for an insurrection. There’s no band on stage, just boisterous jazz on a record player, and it’s emptier than she’s used to seeing. There are brown and even some white faces dotted amongst black ones. She searches for Yolanda before she remembers that the other woman still must be scheduled on the night shift. They can’t all be from OCCAM; she wonders where Duane managed to find all these people. 

“You came.” Duane sounds amused, and pleasantly surprised, though he shouldn’t be. She _said_ she was going to come, and she keeps to her word. Zelda turns to see him looming over her. Like her, he’s dressed in his Sunday best, and it occurs to her that she’s never seen him in anything other than his drab cafeteria uniform. It suits him. He gestures lazily towards the area cleared in front of the stage, where a handful of couples are dancing. She opens her mouth to protest, and he grins. “You don’t need to say it; I know you’re a married woman. Will you dance with me if I promise to keep your virtue intact?” 

“I think,” Zelda says carefully, “that you got no more concern for my _virtue_ than you do for what goes into that damned meatloaf you make. But my man ain’t gone out dancing with me in an age and I do love this song.”

She lets him pull her onto the floor with him, casting only one or two nervous glances back at Rev. Thomas. He keeps a respectful distance, it’s true, but there’s nothing virtuous about how he moves his hips.

Not that she has an objection. She’s got morals; that doesn’t mean she’s got no libido.

“What do you think?” he asks.

“You’re a better dancer than you are a cook.” 

“Wasn’t what I meant.” He twirls her, and she catches a glimpse of the scattered gathering, faces and bodies worn from the long hours unloading crates and scrubbing floors and preparing food that their own meager salaries barely cover. Hardly a glorious revolution, she thinks. “Some of them are here because of you.”

“Then they’re damn fools.” But she lets him dip her, his large hand on the small of her back, and she looks right into his warm brown eyes. The song trails off, and he brings her back up and releases her, a devilish grin the promise of another dance, later. The first speaker is up, an organizer from the longshoremen’s union, and Zelda does her best to concentrate on what he’s saying when she’s torn between the disapproving expression on Rev. Thomas’ pursed lips and Duane, stock still behind the speaker, the slight tap of his polished black wingtip shoe the only suggestion that he might be nervous talking in front of even so paltry a crowd.

At last, it’s his turn. He addresses them as brothers and sisters, but at first his speech doesn’t seem to have much to do with politics at all. He talks about the food in the cafeteria, how it’s prepared by black and brown hands and eaten by white mouths, and how they work together but eat separate, but without them, the military’s groundbreaking research would grind to a halt.

“They ain’t never gonna reach the Moon,” he says, “without standing on our backs.”

She is back in Strickland’s office, his hot, fetid breath and the stench of rot from his fingers, and she thinks of how Elisa slid and twisted and danced her way from out under him, stole their greatest victory from the bastards even if she had to die to do it, and Zelda’s still smiling when there’s a crash and the sound system splutters and dies and the cops bust down the door.


	7. Something To Make My Heart Beat the Faster

Zelda freezes. 

The police roll over them in waves, trampling overturned chairs, tossing aside plates and shoving people away from the tables in their rush to get to the stage, shouting the entire time. They’re ordering her to get down but her limbs won’t cooperate; she’s rooted to the ground, staring at the stage.

Duane meets her eyes, right before he’s tackled to the floor.

Time flows around her; she is untouched by it in the blur of motion. _This is an illegal gathering, vacate immediately or be arrested._ She tries to run but her sheer terror is a leaden weight pinning her in place.

Then she sees one of the cops clap his hands on Rev. Thomas and she comes to life again, kicking and struggling until she’s free of the panicked crowd, until she’s nearly on top of the cop, thwacking him in the back with her handbag. She screams wordlessly, the horror of the past month at last surfacing, the sheer, pointless cruelty of it all. She cries out for Elisa, for her monster, tortured and experimented on and shot, for every slur and humiliation she’s ever endured, for every bit of ugliness and injustice in the world, she screams and flails until they wrench her arms behind her back and drag her into a paddy wagon.

She’s barely aware of her surroundings, so furious is she that anyone would attack a man of God, at these beasts who prey on the helpless and fragile, the same breed of men who stride through the hallways of OCCAM and who took Elisa from her. Not even when she’s fingerprinted and processed and led to a jail cell does her heart slow its mad, impassioned thundering. It’s only after, when she’s seated on a hard bench, surrounded by prisoners banging against the bars like caged animals, does she truly realize exactly how much shit she’s landed herself in.

 

* * *

 

Giles gets the call at midnight, listens, and says only, “I’m on my way.” 

Dimitri cries out, groggy, shaken awake by the telephone’s ring. He instantly tenses; they both know that a knock on the door or a final gunshot might come at any time. Giles rushes to his side.

“It’s Zelda—she’s been arrested. I-I need to go, and…” 

This is his fault, Giles decides, though whether it’s for the theft of a river god or a Russian spy, he has no idea. Zelda’s had a hand in both, but she was an innocent, reluctant, and the right thing to do is substantially less clear when she’s the one paying the price. He can see his own guilt mirrored on Dimitri’s face. 

“We don’t know that they’re looking for you,” Giles says, but how can they _not_ be, how can he have thought he’d get away with it?

“I should leave,” Dimitri says, as if he can even stand unaided for more than a few minutes at a time, as if Giles, now, can consider the prospect of losing him. He needs to rescue Zelda, and he needs to protect Dimitri, and he is only an old man who paints pictures that no one wants to buy and watches films that only a dead woman loves as dearly as he does.

“You _can’t_.” The vehemence of his own words startles them both. He adds, “My cats adore you and frankly, they’ve suffered enough tragedy already.”

Giles staggers to the kitchen and finds, after much clattering, a butcher knife. He folds Dimitri’s fingers around the handle, trying not to dwell on the absurdity of expecting a half-blind and badly injured man to defend himself against armed soldiers with a kitchen implement. “I’ll be back—don’t answer the phone…or the door, or—”

The knife gripped in one hand, Dimitri manages to sit up against the wall, his eyes hard and glittering, and Giles reminds himself that he’s sharing an apartment, and likely a fate, with a cold-blooded killer. He can’t quite reconcile that with how much he wishes he could just hug him.

“Please,” Giles says helplessly, “please be here when I come back.”

He flees from the apartment before he can hear Dimitri’s response.

 

* * *

 

Zelda hears her name being called, and looks up to see Giles, rain dripping from the brim of his hat, on the other side of the bars.

“Keep your girl in line from now on,” the guard says. To Zelda, he grunts, “You’re free to go.”

“She’s not my—” But Zelda grabs his elbow and all but hauls him out, and they tumble through the glass doors of the station and out into the rain. 

Giles’ expression shifts from relief to fury as she trails alongside him through the parking lot, her short legs working double to keep up. “What were you _thinking_?” he hisses. “I left the…the _new cat_ at home. Alone.”

Exhausted, she has no idea what he’s talking about. “New cat?”

“The stray Russian Blue.”

“Oh.” She’s not dressed for the rain, which started some time after the raid. She wraps her arms around herself and huddles close to Giles as he unlocks the van. 

“I asked about Duane,” Giles says. “From what I can tell, he’s been charged with incitement to riot, but someone’s already bailed him out, some student lawyers. But I thought—” 

“You thought this was about…the cat.” He’s having trouble with the key and the door. She can see his hands shake through the sheets of rain. 

“Yes, I thought it was about the _fucking cat_.” She’s never heard Giles swear before. It’s like walking in on one’s parents having sex. “Getting yourself involved with…with these miscreants, these rabble-rousers, when _they_ could be _watching._ ”

She raises herself on the tips of her toes to glare at the back of his head. “You’re not the only one who’s got troubles,” Zelda snaps.

Giles finally manages to open the door. It swings open, and he turns towards her. He’s ashen, mouth hanging open in a stunned O.

“I thought they took you too,” he says, so quietly that the rain nearly covers it. “I don’t…that is. After Elisa. I couldn’t bear to lose you too.”

“I ain’t goin’ nowhere, you hear me?” The rain sinks past her collar, down her cheeks, meeting the tears there. “You’re stuck with me, old man. We’re all of us stuck with each other.”

 

* * *

 

In the end, Zelda declares that it’s too late and too far for Giles to take her home, and all she’ll get is a grumpy Brewster and no sleep before tomorrow’s shift. 

“And I know you got no space neither,” she sighs.

“There’s Elisa’s apartment,” he says, even though it hasn’t been Elisa’s for a month now, will never be Elisa’s again. He still expects her to walk though his door with a hardboiled egg and a square of toast; the sag of the floorboards where the water has damaged them, the greater, emptier silence that her light and joyous silence once filled, destroys him every time.

“Your landlord’s gonna have something to say about that.” But she goes along with him, muttering something about a need to check in on Dimitri.

The relief is palpable, so much so that he forgets to call out or, in fact, to give Dimitri any warning at all, and he has a moment of panic when he sees first the empty bed, then the flash of the butcher knife coming towards him. 

It’s Dimitri’s reflexes that save him, not his own. The knife snicks past his ear and clatters to the ground, and Dimitri staggers into the wall, knocked off balance by the sudden change in the weapon’s trajectory. Giles catches him and Zelda scoops up the weapon.

Giles snorts laughter. It’s uncomfortable, inappropriate, even. A month ago, he was helping his neighbor abduct a sea monster from a military laboratory. Two months ago, he was drawing Jell-O and flirting with the guy from Dixie Doug Pies. The absurdity of his present situation, standing in the doorway of his apartment clutching the Soviet agent who just accidentally tried to kill him—it’s all he can do to steady himself and breathe through his wheezes.

Dimitri looks up at him—standing, he’s so much smaller than Giles always thinks—and says, “Have you never heard of a password?”

Now Zelda is laughing too, rain still dripping off her hair, pooling at her feet. She bends forward to wrap her short arms around Dimitri’s back, pulling them both into a hug.

Giles holds his weird, possibly dangerous new family, and thinks that they may well be the death of him. Given this, it’s startling that for the first time since Elisa fell beneath the waves, he feels alive again.


	8. Straighten Up and Fly Right

Zelda expects to be stopped at the doors, and when she isn’t, she has a moment or two of thinking that she’s somehow been spared. She punches in and nods to Yolanda, who ignores her. Maybe she’s poison now, bearing a scarlet letter that marks her as the worst kind of traitor, the kind that undermines the very government that keeps them all safe from the Reds. If they only knew.

She peels off the same good dress she was arrested in, the same that—if she hadn’t gone mad, Duane had gazed at in stark admiration—and changes into her musty uniform. There’s something wrong with the heating in the building again, and the starched cotton isn’t enough to keep out the mid-December cold.

How bone-chillingly cold it must have been in the harbor waters, Zelda thinks, and shivers.

She’s only 40 minutes into her shift when Fleming comes around the corner. “Miss Fuller,” he says, stiffly. She could have sworn she was Zelda to him by now. “My office, please.” 

This is it, she knows. It’s only a matter of whether she’ll lose her job or wind up in prison for the rest of her life. Or worse. She thinks of poor Dimitri, paranoid and in terrible pain, curled up in Giles’ apartment with a butcher knife to defend himself against men with guns and bombs. She thinks of the Rosenberg execution. Her sins are no lighter than theirs, and now she’s betrayed her country twice over. 

Zelda doesn’t have a poker face. She crosses her legs first one way, then the next, pulls down the hem of her skirt. Fleming observes her in careful, studious silence, the same way he looked at the Asset, half-curious and cold.

“Is something wrong, sir?” she asks.

“How long have you been working here, Zelda?” Conversational. Back to “Zelda” again.

“Ten years, sir.”

He nods expectantly, as if her answer is some kind of a revelation. “And would you say,” he continues, “that OCCAM has been good to you? Do you like working here?”

She bites back the barbs that want to fly from her lips, the endless refrain of _Elisa, Elisa_ that pounds in the veins at her temples _,_ and says, “Of course, sir.”

And here it comes. She steadies herself for the blow.

“You were arrested last night. At an illegal gathering.”

“I didn’t—”

He holds up a hand. “I have no doubts as to your intentions, Zelda. I don’t believe you are an agitator. You’ve always been a loyal, diligent worker, even through our recent…troubles. You have a family, don’t you?” 

“A husband. Brewster.”

“And what does Brewster do for a living?” 

“He’s—” She could swear Fleming’s never shown any interest in her personal life. No white man’s ever shown this much interest in her business.

“It must be difficult,” Fleming says. “A woman, toiling away as the sole breadwinner when she must long for more natural, feminine pursuits, the care of children, the maintenance of a well-run household…” He leans across the desk, as if to take her into his confidence. “In light of this, I’m inclined to view your recent association as a mere lapse in judgment, curiosity, no doubt. Easily remedied, in exchange for a small favor.” 

She may not be an educated sort of person, not like Fleming, but no one’s ever called Zelda Fuller a fool. “You want me to spy on them for you.”

“I want you to do your duty as a patriotic American. These people, these _organizers,_ they are not your friends. They’re trade unionists and traitors and Communists.”

“I don’t really know them that well…” She feels heat rising to her face, the horrible pinprick of sweat on her armpits despite the cold. They want Duane, or his friends, whoever they are, and they’ll rip the facility and everyone in it apart to get to them. “That is, I don’t think I’m much use to you, sir.”

“You’re not your friend Elisa,” Fleming says. “You could have a bright future ahead of you.”

She doesn’t dare ask what the alternative is, or what he plans to do with Duane or Lou or any of the others. “Thanks for the offer, Mr. Fleming.”

“Think it over.” He’s jovial again, kindly. A father figure, though, of course, nothing at all like _her_ father. “Don’t take too long.”

 

* * *

 

“He wants you to do what?” 

Zelda is back at Giles’ for the third time this week. Lord knows her Brewster is as much use as a wooden frying pan, but even he’s got enough sense to be suspicious. _Double shift,_ she’d said, _we need the money,_ but his derisive grunt, coupled with the lack of any additional funds, tells her that her excuses are growing less convincing by the day.

She’s packed sausages, ostensibly to save money by bringing both lunch and dinner to work. Fortunately, the guys who work the cafeteria know all about her friendship with Duane and slip her a free meal now and then or she’d starve making sure that Giles and Dimitri don’t. She’d find it ironic that men, convinced that the great gears of the world would stop turning without them, are so helpless without the constant attention of a woman, but she supposes Dimitri doesn’t have much of a choice in that regard.

“Inform,” Zelda says around a greasy mouthful of sausage. She can’t remember the last time she sat down and ate a meal. At work, at home, she’s always rushing, always on her feet. “He knows Duane and them are up to something but he don’t quite know what.” 

“Did he say anything about—” Giles indicates Dimitri, who’s ensconced on the sofa under a blanket, barely picking at his dinner, his attention divided between it, them, and the two cats that swirl around his feet, chirping for scraps. He gives in and pinches off chunks of sausage to feed them.

He looks better, Zelda decides. Still too pale, dark circles under his unfocused eyes, he sits propped up against a pile of throw pillows with the cats purring beside him, less a dead man than one edging his way back into life. Though he holds himself stiffly, in obvious pain, she can’t fail to see his tenacity.

“What are you going to do?” Giles asks. “You wouldn’t—”

Horrified, Zelda says, “Of course not!”

Dimitri blinks owlishly. “To think I thought you were both spies.” 

They both turn towards him. Blind, he doesn’t seem to quite know where to look, and it lends him an air of shyness that she finds endearing. Giles, conversely, blushes, and quickly looks away. It strikes her as a peculiar overreaction, at first, until she realizes _why_ Giles, at his age, doesn’t have a wife, and this new, strange context crashes over her. He is the closest thing she has to a friend, and his hidden shame, though no worse than the lies and crimes they have committed together, was a secret he kept from her. She wonders if Dimitri has any idea.

“You should tell him yes,” Dimitri continues. “But not right away. Pretend to consider, or he won’t believe you’re sincere.”

“Don’t you got even more reason to hate Fleming than I do?”

His hand flies to the bandage over his stomach, and he winces. “Three very good ones,” he says. “I don’t have the opportunity to strike back at him. You do. Tell him yes, and then tell him whatever your friends would like him to hear.”

A man in his position _would_ think like that, assume that everyone is capable of living a secret, double life. It’s more dangerous than refusing; at least if she says no, the only thing she risks is thirty or forty more years scraping piss off the ceiling.

“I’m not a good liar,” she says. 

“That we are all alive says otherwise.”

Giles shakes his head, frowns.

“Can you win?” Dimitri asks her.

In all the furtive meetings, the whispered plans, the glances stolen between their staggered shifts, the question has never really occurred to her.

“I don’t think people like us ever do win,” Zelda says. “But that don’t mean it’s not worth fighting.”


	9. And When the Night Is New

“Close your eyes.” 

“I don’t see why—”

“Because at my age, it’s not often that I get to project an air of mystery.”

Obligingly, Dimitri shuts his eyes. He hears Giles approach—just Giles, he tells himself, stifling the instinctive fear of ambush—and tilt his chin up. Metal, cool against his still-feverish skin, slides over his temples.

“Now open them.” But Dimitri, realizing the reason for several of Giles’ unexplained trips outside, is already staring at a world now blessedly, beautifully in focus.

Giles’ face—the paths of wrinkles he’s guessed at but never seen all that closely, the dark blue-grey of his irises that had blurred into black until now—at once so much older and so much younger than it had been in the fragments of his memory, is, after over a month of blindness, the first thing he sees. He hadn’t known it until now, but the face of this man, who has been by his side at the very moment he’d been convinced that the world had abandoned him, was what he’d wanted to see most of all.

Dimitri pushes at the bridge of his new glasses, adjusting them on his nose. He fights vertigo as he acclimatizes to seeing the edges of things, the details of the Egyptian print on the couch, the spines of every book inside the rich wood and glass cases, every charcoal stroke on the drawing pinned to Giles’ easel.

Had the world always been so intricate? He had all but given up on ever seeing it again. Even the apartment that has become his prison cell—a vastly more pleasant cage than the one in which he had expected to spend the rest of his days, but a cage nevertheless—seems to hold infinite shimmering, exotic depths. 

“It might not be quite right,” Giles says, apologetic. “My optometrist had questions. I said they were for an elderly neighbor who’d broken a hip, there was no way he could come in…”

He won’t cry; he’s wept as much since waking up in Giles’ apartment as in his entire adult life. He is shaking, lightheaded and woozy, and he tries to get up too quickly, forgetting for a moment that just because he can see again doesn’t mean that his other wounds have healed. His abdominal muscles, unused to movement, twist painfully, and he has to grab Giles’ arm to keep from collapsing.

“Take it slowly,” Giles says, and helps him slide to his feet.

In the long days of his convalescence, he’s formed a mental picture of the space in which he finds himself, pieced together from blurs of color and shadow he could see from the bed, from the rambling soliloquies that Giles distracts him with as he putters around his apartment, from, most of all, the poems that Giles reads to him when he can’t sleep or wakes, sweat-drenched and moaning, from nightmares. Now he’s determined to see its facets, for what it reveals about the man who rescued him. Giles’ apartment is as cluttered as his own was sparse, every available surface spilling over with books and magazines, framed paintings clustered on the walls and furniture. He finds two of his ten favorite books on the mismatched shelves in the time it takes to hobble from the bed to the workspace.

The easel is covered with what he thinks at first are texture studies, and only belatedly recognizes as the surface of some body of water. They’re beautiful, certainly, in the way that abstract art has, for him, always been an exercise more intellectual than emotional. His attention is immediately taken, though, by an older drawing mostly buried by the furious waves. He frees it from underneath the other papers and holds it in the light.

Dimitri, too, has drawn the Asset; he is not without artistic talent of his own. But he sees now how amateurish his own attempts were beside Giles’; his technical diagrams are mere ashes beside Giles’ living fire. Elisa, ethereal and doomed, holds the creature in her arms, hidden behind his bulk, the strands of her long hair flowing like the waves that claimed her. Giles has loved and lost them both, the ache of his loneliness tangible in each pencil stroke.

He puts the picture back, wondering if he’s pried into something deeply private.

As if reading his mind, Giles says, “You can look if you want.”

He flips through the sketchbook. “You are very talented.”

Giles, standing just behind him, says, “Klein & Saunders disagreed.” A beat, then, “That’s an advertising agency.”

Some of the drawings are cats, and a few might be preliminary drafts for various advertisements, but most are the male form, lithe and muscular and young, and entirely naked. He glances back at Giles, who takes a step backwards, frowning.

“Well,” Dimitri declares, “capitalists have no appreciation for art.” Giles laughs and visibly relaxes.

Dimitri puts the sketchbook away and moves to the window. The glass is wonderfully cold against his palm; he presses his face to it and breathes in the faint breeze that escapes from the gaps where the pane has warped and bent. It smells of gasoline and fresh snow. Outside, the alleyway is blanketed in a dusting of white. He’s missed the transition to winter, and the dizzy sense of coming unmoored from the universe threatens to overwhelm him again, but he needs to see the bustle of movement outside, a woman struggling with shopping bags, a young couple sneaking a kiss before the movie starts. He needs to know that somewhere, for someone, life continues. He wants to run out into the streets, feel the fresh, crisp air on his face. He wants to pull every book off the shelf and read for hours, like he did as a boy. 

Instead, he sinks into the chair by the easel, wounds aching, already exhausted by even the short shuffle across the room. He feels Giles’ hand on his back, keeping him upright, warm through the thin, slightly tattered silk of a borrowed pair of pajamas.

“Quite enough for one day,” Giles says, softly, and Dimitri barely leans into his hand, too tired to murmur gratitude to this strange, endlessly compassionate man who cannot seem to stop saving his life. He lets Giles guide him back to the bed, pausing only to thumb his host’s copy of _The Catcher in the Rye_ from the shelf.

“It reminds me of a woman I loved very much,” he explains, and this too, is oddly liberating, the most about his past he has ever revealed to another human being in years.

He thinks he sees a flicker of disappointment cross Giles’ face, but it vanishes before he can question why it would be there.

 

* * *

 

Zelda’s a patient woman. She has to be, to live in this world, at the mercy of men who’ve decided they’re her betters, at the very bottom of a very long and very heavy chain of command. Hell, she has to have the patience of a saint to stay married to Brewster all these years.

But the wait is killing her by degrees. It’s the end of the week, and Fleming hasn’t approached her again. She’s supposed to refuse him, to move through the steps of a long and complicated dance she barely knows. How she can do that when he hasn’t even shown his face outside of his office for days is beyond her.

Time slows to a crawl, at home and OCCAM both. She waits for Fleming to make his next move. She waits for Brewster to notice her increased absences. The only hours that flow normally are spent at Giles’ place, the quiet of the television punctuated by stories of Elisa and their shared but not-quite intersecting pasts. For a while, she well and truly believes that this state of affairs can continue forever.

And then she runs into Duane at OCCAM.

 

* * *

 

It’s been days since she’s seen him—and before that, only brief glimpses between their staggered shifts, two planets in asynchronous orbits—and she doesn’t realize until she catches sight of him, throwing a dirty apron into the laundry, that she never really expected to see him again. 

She’s just starting her shift and she’s slept badly, Brewster tossing and turning and belching into the pillow beside her, stinking up the bed with his feet and flatulence. Zelda thinks she might be might be dreaming, but she can still see the faint edges of bruising on his face.

“Thought you got fired.” 

“You ain’t gonna be rid of me that easy.” 

They move awkwardly in each other’s space. Accustomed as she is to throwing her arms around Giles when either of their emotions run too high, she has to restrain herself, as relieved as she is to see him.

“Fleming’s been asking questions,” she says instead.

“Uh huh.” 

“Guess we can’t talk here.”

“I keep trying to get you to go for a milkshake, but you keep turning me down.”

She slaps his arm, a bit harder than she means to. “What do you think you’re doing, joking around at a time like this? Why didn’t they fire us all after what happened at the club?” 

“Best guess?” Duane says. “Someone higher than Fleming thinks he has bigger fish to fry, and we’re the bait.” He shrugs. “I’ll take what I can get.” 

“He wants me to tell him what you’re up to.” Yolanda and one of the others, a new girl, pass by, and she quickly averts her eyes. “We gotta talk. Not here.” Hastily, she scrawls down Giles’ address. “My friend’s place. The one you met.” 

Duane leans in closer to her. His breath smells like peppermint. “The underground life becomes you, Zelda.”

How can he _flirt?_ She’s petrified every time she sees a guard march down the hallway, every time a lab coat clears his throat, every slam of a heavy steel door. She’s been waiting to be discovered, to lose her job or her freedom or worse, and Duane acts like the whole thing’s a joke. Even if he _is_ the one with bruises.

“I’ll see you tomorrow night,” he says.

“Got the graveyard shift again.”

“Friday, then.” She nods. “It’s a date.”

“It’s not a date.”

“A clandestine meeting of two incorrigible revolutionaries, then.”

“I’ll make a pork roast,” Zelda says. A little braver, now. “Don’t _you_ dare make anything. That meatloaf of yours’ll be the death of me before Fleming is.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Duane says sweetly.


	10. A Willow in a Windstorm

Dimitri, perched on a chair and leaning on one elbow over the kitchen counter, folds dough over teaspoons of chicken and onions and pinches it shut between his fingers. It’s repetitive, labor-intensive. He remembers his mother spending long hours in the kitchen doing this same exacting task, the smell of garlic and cooked meat, how her fingers, cracked and callused and prematurely swollen at the joints, would nevertheless measure and fold each pelmeni with the precision of a scientist. He hums as he works, “Ой, то не вечер,” which, when he thinks about it, was an odd thing for a mother to have sung to a child.

“You don’t need to do that,” Giles says.

“I want to do this,” Dimitri replies. “It takes my mind off the pain.”

This is at most a half-truth; his shoulder and stomach ache from the position, but his wounds are at a point in their healing where any position hurts if he stays in it for too long. The Formica table in what would have been the kitchen might have been better, but it would have taken them an hour to clean all the stuff from its surface, and it’s currently occupied by a territorial Snowflake, whose stray fur would add little to the taste of the dish. He doesn’t know how anyone manages to live the way Giles does.

As much as he appreciates the distraction that cooking affords him, not to mention something to do with his hands, what he really wants is something tangible he can do for Giles, and Zelda, and Zelda’s friend Duane. Not to repay them—as if a human life were something that could be traded back and forth like currency—but to add some small drop to the ocean of kindness in which they’ve surrounded him in. He might have bought a good book for a friend—he would have, if he’d had friends before now—but housebound as he is, his mother’s pelmeni recipe, or some approximation of it, will have to do as a token of his thanks.

“Can I at least help?”

Giles, by his own admission, routinely forgets to eat and barely knows how to boil an egg. “You can observe,” he says. He doesn’t expect Giles to take him so literally, but he grabs his sketchpad from the windowsill and takes a seat on the sofa beside Lilly. Dimitri snorts and returns his attention to the pelmeni. It’s amusing to think of himself as a muse for Giles’ pencil, short and stocky and balding in and amongst all those beautiful young Adonises. 

It is a waste, Dimitri thinks, a talent such as his squandered on advertising and doodling unsellable sketches of washed-up Soviet spies. But so much is a waste in this country that leaves its food to rot in garbage bins lest it otherwise go to the poor, and condemns bright souls like Zelda’s and Elisa’s to a lifetime of drudgery.

“Why are all your paintings unfinished?” he asks. Pain has, it seems, robbed him of tact.

Giles puts the pencil down, and stares wistfully at the portrait of a woman, half-rendered. He’s silent for a time.

“I suppose,” he says, at last, “when they’re finished, they’d have to go out into the world.”

_And be rejected,_ he doesn’t need to add. Or sit propped against a wall, gathering dust. There’s no purpose in being outraged; Giles has made his peace with it, and Dimitri has only ever been one man, slightly out of step with the fashion and mores and politics of the day.

“Where would you be,” Giles counters, “if you didn’t need to be here?”

He doesn’t even hesitate. “Home,” he says, then adds, “Minsk. Not that…well, they wouldn’t have sent me back, even if I’d followed my orders to the letter.” He sprinkles the last batch of pelmeni with flour and gathers the dumplings up to boil. Suppresses the pang of wistfulness, from the onion and garlic scents of his childhood kitchen, the knowledge that once he has healed, once Giles sends him on his way, he’ll once again be adrift and far from anything familiar. “There are much worse places I could be than here.”

“That,” Giles says, “is by far the greatest compliment ever paid to my apartment.”

“We are still not eating in here.”

“Understood,” Giles says, sounding amused, and if Dimitri thinks of neither his past nor his future, if he is only here, in this apartment, with his friends around him, he could almost imagine himself at peace.

 

* * *

 

The conspiratorial dinner, instead, is held in Elisa’s apartment, which Mr. Arzoumanian is two, maybe three disappointed prospective tenants away from declaring a lost cause. It still reeks of seaweed, but the Formica table, unlike Giles’ near-identical one, has been used for its intended purpose sometime this century. The records have escaped flood damage, and he puts on one of her favorites. Does a whirl with his feet as he returns to the table and the tantalizing smells of cooked meat, the mismatched wine glasses, collected from the apartments of two once-lonely people, brimming with a cheap red that’s all he can afford now that his savings are close to drying up.

Zelda and Duane are dressed for church, and he feels shabby by comparison in his brown cardigan and baggy trousers. At least Dimitri is nearly as unkempt, having managed to barely shrug, with a great deal of effort and pain, into Giles’ old sweater and corduroys; he’s shorter and broader than Giles and the clothes hang oddly on him. For two gentlemen of leisure, they are a pitiful sight, though their guests are gracious about it.

Duane, for his part, is hesitant, almost formal. “Dr…Dimitri.” Of course, Giles realizes, they worked in the same building for weeks, maybe months, might have passed each other hundreds of times in the hallways without knowing that they were both undermining the same enemy. 

“Just Dimitri is fine,” the scientist replies, lightly. “Though the doctorate isn’t a cover.”

“But the rest. Are you really—”

“I am, really. And I want to help.”

Giles knows he should be horrified, listening to a Soviet spy discussing workplace sabotage with a Negro agitator in between effusive praise for Zelda’s pork roast. 

_(“_ Former _spy,” Dimitri corrects._

_“Unrepentant communist,” Giles counters._

_The distinction is lost on you. Perhaps a private joke? But it gratifies you to see the sparkle in the old man’s eyes._

_“It_ was _a great roast, though.”)_

He meets Zelda’s eyes, expecting to see the same trepidation written there, but she is as much an active participant as they are, adding what she knows about Fleming’s habits, Hoyt’s rare appearances at the facility, the movements of the MPs, the sympathies of various workers and their position in the pecking order.

His sensible new friend, it seems, has become a revolutionary in her own right.

To further exacerbate his ambivalence, his sympathies are swayed in favor of the nascent rebellion by Dimitri’s cooking. He’d always envisioned the Soviet Union as a grinding nightmare of breadlines and pinched, starving faces, but the pelmini, sprinkled with dill and doused in sour cream, belies that image. If armies run on their stomachs, between Dimitri and Zelda, OCCAM’s revolt has a chance of succeeding.

He lets the talk of false leads to be shared with Fleming and information to be whispered in stairwells and washrooms, Dimitri’s memories of his father’s organizing work, Duane’s stories about the small uprisings and refusals dotting the country as people begin to wake up, Zelda’s recollections of who said what to whom, all of it fade into the beat of the music, the taste of home-cooked food in his mouth. How can he disapprove of their subversion, after all, when he too is an inveterate deviant?

Or perhaps it’s the wine. It’s been a long time since he had so much as a drop.

He’s, in fact, so lightheaded that he notices only belatedly as the conversation takes on less politics and more gossip. He nearly stumbles over his chair when he gets up to change the record; Zelda is there, catching him by the hands, and he steps with her, tapping his feet, forwards and back, like he once danced with Elisa. She laughs, sweet and musical, and as they dance, it’s as if the weight of all they’ve endured, all the loss and grief and fear, is lifted. As if _she’s_ still there, her high-heeled shoes sliding across the creaking hardwood floors.

He presses his cheek to the top of her head, sees Dimitri, still seated at the table, yawn. Duane rises as the song fades out and the next one begins, and Zelda, giddy from the wine, careens away from Giles and into his arms.

Giles returns to Dimitri’s side to join him in his quiet observation. Both Zelda and Duane are good dancers—if he’s honest, better than he has ever been—and they’re both clearly in love with each other. Poor Zelda, he decides; no revolution can free her from her millstone of a husband. To be old and not fuck is a pity; to be as young and lovely as they both are, a tragedy.

Dimitri’s face is lined in pain, the shadows under his eyes deeper than they were this afternoon. Giles pats his arm. “You’ll be dancing with the rest of us in no time,” he says, and promptly feels ridiculous. He has no way of knowing how much Dimitri will ever recover—most people don’t survive three bullet wounds, let alone get up and dance afterwards. “We used to sit in front of the TV and just move our feet.” He demonstrates, the little tap-tap that he’d dance with Elisa. Dimitri, to his credit, doesn’t gape at him like he’s crazy. He tries it out, his stocking feet a half-beat off.

“I was never much of a dancer,” Dimitri admits. “Who could find the time?”

Giles watches Zelda and Duane move, closer now, tempting fate. He was never either, compared to them. But God, does he miss being young.

Dimitri yawns again, leans his head into Giles’ shoulder. The other two are wrapped up in each other and don’t notice, and maybe it’s a Russian thing, maybe he’s drunk, or tired. It’s foolhardy to imagine any other explanation.

“Shall we leave them to it?” Giles asks.

Dimitri nods. Giles has to half-carry him back to his own apartment; Dimitri, clumsy from fatigue and half a glass of wine, clings heavy on his arm. He helps Dimitri onto the bed, only to be dragged onto the mattress beside him.

Without thinking, he automatically moves to help Dimitri unbutton his shirt, he won’t be able to manage it, not with only one functional arm, but the younger man catches one of his wrists in a tight grip. Meets his eyes, his face serious.

“Are you a homosexual?”

The question comes as a shock, though he’s been bracing himself for the revelation since Dimitri woke up, the inevitable death of their tentative, fragile connection. His hands, half an inch from Dimitri’s chest, freeze.

“Yes,” he says, wishing to hell that he didn’t sound so apologetic. “I am.”

“Forgive me.” It might have been a smile, if the scar on his face didn’t twist it into a grimace. “Wine makes me blunt. It’s a failing. It’s just—I thought you might want to kiss me, and if you did…that is, well, I wouldn’t presume...”

Now he’s trembling, or Dimitri is. One of them is nervous, and his head is buzzing too hard to tell which. “You were in love with a woman,” Giles says, picking through the words like a minefield. “You said.”

“Two women, briefly,” Dimitri corrects. “Over the course of my entire life. What kind of scientist would I be if I closed myself off to all other possibilities?”

Direct as he is, it takes Giles a minute to process that he actually means it. “Do you?” Giles asks. “Want to kiss me?”

“Very much so. If you’re willing.” Dimitri blinks, takes a deep breath, as if physically gathering his courage. Then he straightens up, biting back a hiss of pain, releases Giles’ wrist to wrap his hand around the back of his neck and draw him into a kiss.

It’s nothing like the violent embraces of Giles’ youth, but, of course, Dimitri is nothing like the gorgeous, rough boys he’s loved before. Dimitri’s lips are soft, and his breath tastes like garlic and wine, and he’s terribly careful, as if Giles and not he would shatter with a single wrong move. He takes off his glasses and places them on a shelf beside the bed. He has the kindest eyes Giles has ever seen. 

Giles slides his palm over Dimitri’s spine, and is rewarded with a pleased little shiver, Dimitri clutching him closer, pressing his face into Giles’ neck. Giles strokes his thinning hair. His libido, long-tamed, has re-awakened after his recent adventures, but he refuses to give into it despite the temptation of a warm, enthusiastic partner in his bed, not with the risk of aggravating Dimitri’s injuries.

“I’ll break you,” Giles says. “For God’s sake, you can’t even _walk,_ you should still be in a hospital…”

“I would prefer not to sleep alone tonight.” Dimitri says. “I think you feel the same. But I won’t beg.”

Giles swallows. He stretches out on the bed beside Dimitri and wraps his arms around him, adjusting them both until Dimitri seems comfortable. The bed is too narrow for two men to avoid any sense of impropriety. 

Dimitri, for his part, relaxes. Giles wonders how long he’s been contemplating this, whether it’s born from a spontaneous drunken whim or whether he’s been observing, plotting, waiting for the right time to make his move. Either way, his breathing steadies and he sighs, murmurs something that Giles can’t quite make out and might not even be English. 

It’s been years since Giles has slept like this, wrapped around another body, and the heat, the sound of someone else’s breathing, the feeling of his own heart, thudding hard against his ribs, is nearly enough to keep him awake.

He sleeps anyway, Dimitri curled against him, humming a song from thousands of miles and decades away, the first rays of dawn reflecting off the dusty warehouse windows outside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for any inaccuracies. I have never been brave or patient enough to make my own pelmini.


	11. All or Nothing At All

“You know,” Zelda says, “girl was my best friend for ten years and I never stepped foot in this place, not once, until she—”

Zelda is not in denial, not like Giles is, but she still doesn’t know how to say aloud that Elisa is gone. Dead. One syllable isn’t enough to encompass a loss that isn’t quite that, the uncertainty of bubbling black waters and sheets of rain.

The record has ended, and with that, the excuse to stay caught up in Duane’s arms. She’s noticed, peripherally, that they’re alone; she saw Giles and Dimitri slip out earlier. No one is watching them now, except maybe Elisa’s ghost. It’s nevertheless easier to run her hand over the warped wood paneling on the walls, walk her stocking feet over the creaking floorboards, turn her nose at the smell of mold sprouting in the house, than it is to mention it. Whole place needs to be gutted, she thinks, stripped right down to the insulation. Brewster’d know how to do it, if he got his lazy ass up out of his lounger.

“Never imagined any white lady living with this fish smell.” Duane goes to the window. There’s a little moonlight, enough to etch the outline of his face in a silver sliver.

She bites down the objection that the place wasn’t like this before, but it seems irrelevant, really. She’d never thought of how Elisa lived, outside of OCCAM. If pressed, she might have imagined tufted headboards, a mirror vanity like the bedroom of a Hollywood star, all white and gold and pink, though logically, she knew that Elisa made no more than she did, and could never have afforded anything so glamorous. “She was something special.”

“She’d have joined in our strike.”

Zelda laughs. “She’d have led it.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t get to know her better.”

Each reminder that she’s gone forever is a needle stabbed through her heart. “Duane?” 

He turns, arms crossed and backlit by the window. She takes a step closer, then another.

“You believe in all this stuff? Strikes and protest and marches? I mean, you think it’s really gonna change how things run around here?”

“I think it’s gonna change the whole country. Can’t you feel it?”

She wants to, she does. She’s seen him command crowds, people who barely talked to each other at OCCAM, even the Reverend, who considers Dr. King a dangerous subversive, but she’s also seen the cops break down the door of the Arch Social Club. For every Elisa, she thinks, for every small triumph of resistance and love, there’s a team of men waiting to shoot it down. She shakes her head, and the next thing she knows, he’s right next to her, his big hands on her shoulders. She’s not a small woman but his presence dwarfs her, surrounds her.

“ _Everything_ can change. In a heartbeat.” He whispers it like a promise. “Look at Russia.”

“That didn’t work out so well for poor Dimitri.”

“Yeah, well,” Duane shrugs. “He’s a better communist than the Bolsheviks. So much the worse for him. We just gotta be smarter.” 

She rolls her eyes. “Smarter than a guy whose PhD isn’t the only thing he _didn’t_ lie about?”

“There was just one of him, though. There’s a whole country of us.”

When he says it like that, she almost believes in him, in the mutters of dissatisfaction coalescing into a roar, and she almost hates him for it, too. She’s spent so long believing that the closest to freedom a woman could get was doing what Elisa did, throwing away her life for a glimpse of something beautiful. It hurts too much to believe that anything more is possible.

It’s only when she raises herself up her tiptoes to kiss him that she realizes that somewhere along the line, between her mom and her dad’s drunken friend and Brewster and OCCAM, she’s forgotten what it’s like to want something badly enough that you’re willing to burn down everything else in the world for it.

“Don’t run off this time,” he says when they draw apart to catch a breath.

“Brewster—”

“Prob’ly passed out by now.” He strokes her cheek, smoothes a strand of her wig away from her face. She wants to tear it off, let him see her in full, stripped of her hair, her uniform, her wedding ring, naked and free. “Feel this fish-sex-smellin’ hovel calling to you. It’s telling you to stay here with me.” 

She’s not Elisa. She has no desire to die for love.

But she doesn’t leave. Not yet.

 

* * *

 

Dimitri wakes by degrees, adjusting to the weight of the arm thrown over his waist, the pressure of Giles’ chest against his back. The memory of last night returns in pieces: Duane’s all-too-accurate comedic impressions of Fleming, Zelda, relaying a dozen small acts of workplace rebellion and sabotage that they imagine blooming into justice. The warmth around the kitchen table, the easy camaraderie of being around people from whom he held no secrets, who knew who he was and what he’d done, who knew even his real name, and nonetheless broke bread with him, debated politics and art and music with him, folded him into the strange, complex patterns of their lives.

Giles, holding him, scared and uncertain and so terribly gentle, just as Dimitri had imagined he’d be—had hoped he would be, as if Dimitri were a blushing schoolboy and not a man nearing middle age attempting to romance someone a quarter-century his senior. It had been so long since bookish, dreamy Evelyn, and even longer since his poor, doomed Nadezhda, murdered by fascists along with so much of his city, so long since anyone had looked on him as anything other than a means to an end. Giles is like no one he has ever met, and if the curious alchemy that has turned his gratitude for his rescuer to affection is sudden and merciless, he attributes it to the circumstances of their meeting, the vertigo of how close to the precipice of death they had both been standing. 

He can feel sunlight on his eyelids—outside the quarter circle window that takes up most of the wall, it’s the first clear day in weeks—and he moans softly as the intrusion of consciousness brings with it a reminder that it’s been hours since his last round of painkillers, and both the medication and the alcohol have worn off. Giles shifts beside him, bracing Dimitri’s aching body against his own, rubbing his sternum in small circles. He squirms closer, reveling in the alien sensation of being held and cared for. Careful as he’s otherwise had to be, he has always been impulsive in matters of the heart, typically to his detriment. But this is different, he decides. He has fallen in love before, and he flatters himself to think that at least a few people have loved him back, but Giles is the first person who has ever made him feel _safe_.

Something brushes his face, and he finally opens his eyes, only to see Lilly’s ass displayed a few inches from his nose. Giles snorts and reaches over to shove her out of the way.

“It’s true love,” Giles says, pushing the cat down the bed only to have her, purring, return to butt her face against Dimitri’s chin. “I took her in, a sickly stray, fed her, cared for her, for eight years, but her treacherous heart belongs to you.” 

Dimitri rolls onto his back, head pillowed on Giles’ arm, to get a better angle for the cat. He wants to stay here forever, here in this unbearably messy apartment, with this ridiculous old bohemian and his collection of aggressively needy cats. Logically, he knows it’s impossible—every day he spends here puts Giles in danger—but he’s spent the last ten years of his life fighting lonely battles and knowing only enemies and dupes. He barely remembers how to exist any other way, how to simply lie in someone’s arms and be at rest.

He did not, however, survive behind enemy lines by being idealistic.

“They will come knocking eventually,” he says. “And then they will arrest you, or worse. You must know this.” 

“Shh.” Giles props himself up on an elbow and runs his long fingers down the side of Dimitri’s neck, across his collarbone, tracing his shoulder with just enough pressure to ease the ache in his muscles without jostling his wound. It’s so soothing that he almost falls back to sleep and is instead left wondering how this strange artist has the power to shut off his higher brain functions with a single touch. “You’re not the only one who knows a thing or two about staying hidden.”

 _But not enough,_ Dimitri thinks, _neither of us, or we wouldn’t be here._

He’ll have to run, when he’s recovered enough. Not home; he’ll die here after all, whether it’s tomorrow or in fifty years. Maybe back to Canada, with a different name. He’ll have to be anonymous, find whatever menial work he can under the table. He’s accustomed to economic poverty, but not impoverishment of the mind or spirit—he doesn’t know whether it will be the loss of his career or this brief, sweet companionship that breaks him first. 

“You’re worrying too much again,” Giles says. “Do you really think I’d allow some jackbooted government thugs to abscond with the first man to appreciate my paintings since this ghastly trend towards photography?”

It’s a cruel temptation, to believe that Giles will protect him when two great powers call him their enemy. That Giles would _want_ to do so, to betray his country for a melancholic, scarred traitor who can offer him nothing but a short and dangerous life. No one is that generous, that open-hearted, not even in his homeland where brotherhood and solidarity are enforced with an iron fist, and certainly not here, where men are taught to be no better than vicious stray dogs fighting to the death for scraps.

No, he does not believe that just when he has lost everything, he could finally get what he wants. Hope is a decadent luxury he has never been able to afford.

But in the end, what else does he have?

 

* * *

 

Zelda takes the first morning bus home, the sunrise cold and wan though the smudged window. The house is silent, and slipping off her shoes, her feet make no sound on the floor as she pads past Brewster’s sleeping bulk in the living room and up the stairs to bed.

Her heart is light despite the guilt that ought to be pressing on it from all directions; she is an adulteress, or as good as, no better than the wicked Delilah whose name she shares. But every inch of her skin is alive, and thrumming, with love and hope and things unnamable, a hidden seam that runs from her veins through to every single man and woman who takes a stand against the world’s injustice. 

She remembers that Dimitri is almost out of pain medication. The poor man, he doesn’t complain at all, but she can see how much he’s clearly still suffering even with Giles fussing over him. Her purse still slung over one shoulder, she rifles through the medicine chest until she finds Brewster’s pills. The bottle is three-quarters full, she’s been careful, taking only what she can when he’s too drunk to notice, but sooner or later— 

Zelda decides she’ll deal with later when it comes, and she’s just about to uncap the bottle when she hears heavy footsteps clunking up the stairs behind her.

“Damn fool woman,” Brewster growls. “Just what in fuck do you think you’re doing?”


	12. Why Don't You Do Right?

Brewster’s barely moved in the eleven years since the accident, but damn if he isn’t fast now, boxing her in between the medicine chest and the wall, the bottle of pills clutched in her fist so hard that she nearly breaks it. Both his hands slam into the wall on either side of her head, and she can feel his breath hot on her face.

Still, she tries to wriggle free. “Hurt my back at work a couple days ago,” she says. “Didn’t wanna wake you.”

“Horseshit.” Brewster says. “I don’t know what you’re up to but I know you’re up to something. It’s that mute girl again, ain’t it?”

“It _ain’t_ ,” Zelda fires back. She has no idea where this sudden burst of bravery has come from. Maybe there’s only so long you can keep a lid down on your rage until it froths up anyway and spits right in your face. “Elisa’s _dead_. Because of you, because _you_ gave her up.” The words are sharp and vicious on her tongue, each one launched with the force of the bullet that killed her best friend.

“Better her than us,” Brewster replies. 

She slips the bottle into her purse. “I need these,” Zelda says, “for a friend.”

“You fuckin’ around on me?” her husband asks. “That it?”

It occurs to her, not for the first time, that he could kill her. That he _would_ kill her, if he knew about Duane, who is only the most recent and minor of her transgressions, Duane, who’s brash and cocky, like Brewster used to be, but uses his strength not to bend other people to his will but to build them up and make them just as strong as he is. Hell, she _should_ be fucking around, but what’s a dance, a stolen kiss or two, compared to espionage and revolution?

“If I was,” Zelda says, “no one would blame me, the way you been treatin’ me.”

She expects the blow, and whips her face to one side to avoid the brunt of it, and isn’t that just like a man to resort to violence when he knows he’s wrong? He could kill her, and many a woman has died for less, but that’s the worst he can do. She’s faced down real monsters, Strickland, and after that Brewster is weak, impotent, even if he could crush her windpipe in his fist. Her offence at his stupidity is worse than the sting across her cheek, worse than the shock of her husband raising a hand to her for the first time in their marriage.

“Stupid _bitch,_ ” Brewster growls, and she brings the point of her knee into the side of his leg. He’s bigger and stronger but the inactivity’s had an effect on him; he jerks backwards in shock and she’s free long enough to slam her elbow across his ribcage, one hard jab towards his spine, knocking him off balance. She grabs the cup that holds their toothbrushes, his and hers, and slams it into his temple.

A scream wrenches itself free from her throat and she kicks at him, her feet instinctively finding soft places, his throat, the twisted muscles of his lower back, her body lashing out of its own accord, her mind observing at a distance as her fury vents itself upon her husband’s thrashing form. All the love that was wasted on him, that she thought had died in her, comes out deformed and hideous; she wants to kill him, for all that ingratitude, her barren, lonely nights, his grunts and belches and farts, most of all for Elisa, who would still be with her, still be alive, if Brewster could have just kept his damned mouth shut.

Brewster lies there, twitching and moaning, blood pouring from his head onto the shattered tile. He cries like a child. Zelda readjusts her purse strap on her shoulder. Stands over him. Looks down, and wonders how hatred can evaporate, just like that. All she can feel for him is pity.

She pulls the pill bottle from her purse, unscrews the cap, and shakes out a few into her palm. She places them on the floor beside him. He’ll need them. 

“Don’t come lookin’ for me,” Zelda says. “Don’t you even dare.”

She walks to the bedroom, slow and methodical. Packs a bag—a clean spare uniform, her good dress, a few changes of stockings and underwear. The book she’s been trying to read, Zora Neale Hurston’s _Moses, Man of the Mountain,_ and can’t between the fatigue and Brewster’s snoring, that goes in too, making barely a noise as it slips into the folds of clothing.

She takes one last look at her house, the indent on the living room chair where her husband will live out his days, her little kitchen and the smudge of blood on the wall that she hasn’t cleaned from when Strickland invaded her home. She whispers goodbye under her breath and she walks out into the morning.

 

* * *

 

Giles has no desire to leave his bed. He will die in it, of hunger or dehydration, one or both of which will arrive before he’s ready to part from Dimitri’s embrace, before he’s willing to relinquish the other man’s soft kisses, the desperate tug of his fingers through Giles’ (thick, brown, flecked with red and blond, just as it had been when he was young) hair.

They spend long hours entwined in a tangle of bed sheets, in slow, cautious exploration of each other’s bodies. There are, even now, mocking voices in his head that sound rather remarkably like his brothers, insisting that there is something ugly and weak and perverse in him, and neither Dimitri’s affection nor Zelda’s friendship nor, even, Elisa’s memory, can change it. He silences them by noting that even if, in the twilight of his life, he doesn’t deserve whatever happiness the world will give him, Dimitri—starved for years of joy and love and the slightest human connection, condemned to unimaginable suffering for the sin of compassion towards another being—certainly does.

They can’t fuck, not with the risk of re-opening Dimitri’s wounds or moving the wrong way and awakening the pain that the pills and Giles’ tentative caresses has temporarily subdued. Instead, he experiments with the same dedicated precision as his nervous little scientist, reciprocating Dimitri’s uncertain advances, touching him anywhere he safely can, testing out what he likes, what he wants. He is rewarded, not merely with the stirrings of his own long pent-up desires, but with Dimitri’s soft, surprised cries of pleasure, the look of wonderment in his dark, unfocused eyes as he remembers that his body can be something other than a cage of pain.

Giles still can’t believe that Dimitri would want _him._ He must have expressed that particular doubt aloud one too many times, because Dimitri laughs in his face and says, “Why wouldn’t I?”

“I’m old enough to be your father, for starters.” 

That’s a scar that hasn’t managed to heal, no matter how minor it seems in the context of everything that has happened in these bewildering days. He flushes with shame at his own vanity—he may see an old man in the mirror, but Dimitri, young as he is, will see the shattered wreck where a bullet tore through his face—yet the sting of rejection, _old man,_ _faggot, obsolete_ , from Bernie, from the boy at Dixie Doug’s, from all of them, hasn’t abated.

“Hmm.” Dimitri indulges him by pretending to mull it over, as if Giles knows he hasn’t already. “Neither of us are much to look at, I think. But one of us—” he reaches up to ruffle Giles’ hair, the tangible evidence that Elisa and her monster are anything but a fever dream, “—ages in reverse, and grows handsomer by the day.” 

_(“If only that were true,” Giles says, looking down at his ancient hands, too bent with arthritis to hold a pencil. Dimitri turns, the shadows once again concealing most of his face.)_

It occurs to him that Dimitri finds this _funny,_ and despite that, Giles tells him about Brad-no-John, whatever his name had been, from Ottawa, with his fake down-home accent and his engagement to his pretty waitress, and his scorn; Giles tries his best to keep his tone light, self-deprecating, and he expects Dimitri to laugh at that too, but instead he looks Giles in the eyes and says, his voice completely serious, “Would you like me to kill him?”

It ought to be more disturbing that Dimitri _could,_ that he’s murdered at least one person and God knows how many others in the course of his duty to the Glorious Motherland, but of course he can’t _mean_ it this time. He’s a good man, incapable of taking a life for so small and ordinary an insult. Probably. Giles shakes his head.

“Would you?”

“It is not men like Strickland who make your country this way,” Dimitri says, gesturing with his good arm, as if the cracked paint on the walls, the piles of books below the window, were somehow responsible for the Cuban Missile Crisis and the atom bomb and Jim Crow and Marilyn Monroe. “Oh, maybe it is, but there can’t be many of them. Not enough to condemn us all and reduce cities to radioactive ash. There are many more who would deny a seat to a Negro family at a restaurant. Or who would hurt someone I…care about.” 

“It’s not even a _good_ restaurant,” Giles says. “The pies were inedible.” With the chaos his life has been, between helping Elisa and the creature and looking after Dimitri, he probably has a slice or two stuffed in the back of his fridge, gathering mold, if there’s enough organic matter in them for mold to take root.

“I can make you a pie.” Dimitri appears to realize that this is an easier thing to accomplish than assassination, at least in his current condition, and Giles understands, with a certain amount of trepidation, that he cannot avoid falling in love with this man, that their collision is as inevitable as it is tragic. Dimitri has no more future here than he does in his own country; if he walks out the door, he will be hunted to his death, but no one can live pent up in a bachelor apartment forever. And yet he talks of baking pies and poetry and the prospect of revolution in America as if they would have a lifetime together, he compliments Giles’ record collection (the classical section of it, if not the musicals) and taste in books, as if he wasn’t a killer and a wanted man, as if he could simply make the world bend to his demands.

Giles gathers him close and kisses his high forehead, his temple, the underside of his jaw, even coming dangerously close to the twisted knot of scar tissue on the right side of his face, so he knows it doesn’t matter, that nothing about him is too broken to be unlovable. “You’re so fucking incredible,” he whispers into Dimitri’s hair, glad that the angle means that Dimitri can’t see his blush when the words spill out. 

“Decide that after you’ve tried my baking,” Dimitri replies, face nuzzling into Giles’ collarbone. He’s so small. It’s another contrast from the men he’s normally attracted to, but Giles loves how completely he’s able to wrap around him, how they fit like puzzle pieces slotted together. Giles is close to contentment when Zelda comes crashing through the door.

 

* * *

 

She’s walked for hours. Her feet hurt worse than they do after a day’s work, her back too, shifting her overnight bag and purse from one shoulder to another. She can’t go to Duane’s; he’s told her that he lives in a rooming house with three other men sharing his bedroom, dirty mattresses pushed against the wall and everything he owns stuffed into a single drawer. And she can’t go to anyone she knows from church. If it’s a sin to leave her husband, it’s a greater one to leave him lying bleeding into the tiles of her bathroom floor. She could swear she had other friends once, before the storm of Elisa’s short life grew so all-consuming that it swallowed everything else, but none she trusts, not with this. 

So there’s only Giles, who has given her the key that had once belonged to Elisa, and she doesn’t even think to knock, because he’s a lonely man and Dimitri even lonelier, and they always seem so happy to see her, and anyway, she’s just broken the solemnest vow a woman can take in a few different ways and she’s exhausted and her head is spinning.

At first her brain doesn’t make sense of what she sees, the two of them tangled up together on the Murphy bed, Dimitri’s thin hair sticking up in all directions, his head tucked under Giles’ chin, two pairs of glasses forming a right angle, perched precariously on a pile of books on the nightstand. She winces with sympathy. They must have had a rough night, she decides; Dimitri had looked so tired when they’d left for Giles’ apartment. She almost forgets her own worries in concern for him.

Almost. Until she sees the pile of clothes strewn across the floor, hastily thrown, and the shape of their sin, as unfathomable and unforgivable as her own, becomes apparent. Zelda drops her purse and bag with echoing thuds on the floor, like gunshots, turns heel, and runs.


	13. The Lives You Love to Lead

“Go after her,” Dimitri says. Giles is already pulling his pants back on, straightening his hair, wondering if this is a situation where he bothers with a tie or not. His foot snags on the cuff of his trousers and he almost falls, as if his clothing is doing its best to keep him from the kind of confrontation he’s had, with depressing regularity, since sixth grade.

He has committed the gravest of errors, he knows: that of complacency. He has allowed himself friends, a sense of belonging, even a lover, of sorts, but these are things that can never belong to men like him.

He briefly contemplates bringing Dimitri with him. After all, Zelda has known him slightly longer than she’s known Giles, and he’s less prone to panicking under pressure. But he can’t—there’s too much chance someone will see him, and to get him to the van means getting him down two flights of stairs, which, on a bad day, is not exactly gentle on Giles’ knees, and he’s not recovering from multiple gunshot wounds. He adjusts the brim of his hat and sits on the edge of the bed, reaching for Dimitri’s hands. 

“Will you be okay?” 

Dimitri nods. “Make sure Zelda is.” Giles hesitates, then leans over and kisses his cheek, lightly but definitively. Dimitri squeezes his hands. “Go.” 

Outside, it’s starting to rain. He almost goes back for an umbrella, but Zelda already has a head start on him, and while he has the van, she’s on foot and might have gone in any direction.

Giles circles the block twice. The rain turns to hard pellets of ice, and he almost swerves into the sidewalk before he remembers that there is only one place Zelda would go.

He finds her at the docks, huddled into her coat and watching the rain pebble off the half-frozen surface of the water. He calls her name, but she doesn’t turn, and whether it’s because she hates him or she can’t hear him over the rain. He approaches, cold hands thrust into the pockets of his trench coat. She might have been crying; the rivulets of water breaking into dendrite tracks along her cheeks could have just as easily been from the sky. Slowly, afraid to startle her this close to the edge of the dock, he touches her sleeve, and she finally turns.

_Please talk to me,_ Giles signs.

Zelda’s face contorts with fury. “Don’t,” she hisses. “You have no _right._ ”

He does anyway, hand circling over his chest. _I’m sorry._ He adds, out loud: “I thought you knew. About me. I didn’t want you to find out like this.”

“Did you want me to find out at all?”

Ashamed, he puts his hand back in his pocket, clenches his fingers together in an attempt to generate some heat. “Can we go back inside? It’s freezing out here.”

“I keep waiting,” Zelda’s words are all but swallowed by the sheets of ice. “If I’m just here at the right time, if I just pray hard enough, with the right words, I’ll see her coming up out of those waves.” She pauses, then: “I did figure it out, Giles.” 

“What?”

“You. Would have guessed with him, too, if I didn’t have my own problems to worry about.”

“I know what you must think of me, of _us…_ ”

Her eyes bright with tears, shining, she spits out, “ _Do_ you? What is it that you think you know about me?”

“You—you go to church.” His stammer is back, and he curses himself; they’re already shouting to be heard over the rain. God, it’s cold. He’s been out a few minutes and he’s already soaked through. “What you saw—what I am. It’s against your beliefs.”

“I left Brewster,” Zelda bites out, the words a clash of steel grinding on steel. “I left him lying on the floor, bleeding, and I just walked right out.”

“I’m sorry.” Cold or not, it was easier to sign.

“Shoulda done it years ago. That man was no good, and he wasn’t ever gonna get better. Shoulda done it sooner.”

And what future would she have had then, a single, black divorcee, working as a night janitor? It takes a moment for her disjointed sentences, thoughts trailed off before completion, to add up. 

“You could have left with _her_ ,” Giles suggests. Two women, living together, that wouldn’t arouse the same kind of suspicion as he’s faced his entire life. It was merely fantasy; if Zelda’s feelings were reciprocated, Elisa certainly never said anything to him about it. But none of that matters now. 

“We coulda had a way out,” Zelda finishes. She doesn’t need to. “She could still be alive.” It’s pointless, this imagined future (and, he could insist, Elisa _is_ alive, for all that Zelda believes him), but it’s festered in her and he’d been too preoccupied to see it. “So don’t you go making assumptions about me, Giles Dupont. Yours ain’t the only heart that’s ever been broken.” 

He hugs her, both of them sodden and freezing, his shaking hands clutching the soggy fabric of her coat. It doesn’t matter that they’re soaking wet, that the rain is so cold it stings where it finds bare skin. They cling to each other as if drowning. At last, his arm slung over her, they stagger back to the van.

“Where will you go?” he asks. “I can speak to Mr. Arzoumanian again…”

She nods, eyelids drooping shut. He has to shake her awake as he pulls in front of the Arcade. He hopes she’s at least brought a change of clothes in that bag; both of theirs are soaked through.

Dimitri is sitting on the sofa when Giles raps out the ridiculous short-long-short-short knock they’d agreed upon and opens the door, re-reading the worn copy of _Catcher in the Rye_ , the cats perched like bookends on either side of his head. He blinks up as they enter, and it’s all Giles can do not to run to him immediately. But he’s introduced stray cats to each other before, and he knows better than anyone that the process doesn’t always go smoothly.

But then there’s Zelda.

“My best friend did it with a fish-man,” she announces, too loudly, to the entire room. “Did you really think you had to keep secrets from me?”

( _You begin to object—your father is amphibious, not piscine, and you have always objected to the taxonomy with which humans have saddled him—but Giles raises his hand before yours can move into words._

_“It was a very different time,” he says mildly._ )

With this, the matter is settled, the thin thread that has bound the three of their lives together tightens into an unbreakable bond. The creaking walls of the rooms above the cinema are as much Zelda’s and Dimitri’s homes as they are Giles’ now, and when she picks up her bag from where she left it by the doorway, it is merely to transport it into Elisa’s apartment, where—the landlord be damned—she will live until a power greater than any of them forces her out of it.

 

* * *

 

In a just world, Zelda thinks, she would be able to grieve the loss of the second of the two relationships that, for better or worse, defined her life until a month ago. It is not so easy to sever oneself from love, even when that love wilted and dried up a long time ago, even when the first spindly pale green shoots of a new love have pushed their way through the dirt in its place. It still takes time. 

But the world isn’t just, or none of them would be here, and time’s one thing none of them have in abundance, and that’s why Zelda and Duane are in Giles’ living room, being walked through the specifics of how to pass messages back and forth under the enemy’s eyes.

Zelda thinks she remembers Dimitri mentioning that he was a lecturer during one of his previous lives, and she envies his students, who got to know him in his element, insisting on some obscure point of biology with near-violent enthusiasm. He would have been happier there, she imagines, in some university, sharing knowledge that held no military application, just scientific interest, with equally vibrant young minds.

He’s a good teacher, but a strict one. He insists on both of them memorizing a double list of security checks and information; one true set and one bluff set if they are caught by Fleming or one of the MPs. The world of espionage is one of coded questions and phrases, spelling mistakes on secret messages to let the receiver know they’ve been compromised (“Oh, that’s _great,_ ” Duane says, “Lou can’t spell for shit, how we gonna know if he gets caught?”), even as he admits that his handlers never were too great at remembering the passwords themselves.

“My head is spinning,” Zelda complains after the first hour.

“This is nothing,” Dimitri says. “Try having to memorize a five-hundred page dossier and recalling it under torture.”

It’s comments like that, dropped casually before launching into another test, that reminds her of how very different their worlds had been before Elisa and the Asset brought them together. He is entirely nonchalant, as if it was another hurdle to jump through before completing his dissertation. She feels a sudden wave of fierce protectiveness towards him.

“They tortured you?” Giles’ hand creeps towards Dimitri’s, then pauses, still unsure of how much is safe to reveal in front of Duane.

Dimitri looks more annoyed than anything else; the conversation is veering off from the practical into the personal. “It was no use,” he says, his voice much quieter than it had been a moment ago. “It is very different than when it happens for real. I did not break once during training, or they would have never recommended me for the field.”

“This isn’t Russia,” Giles says. “No one will do anything like that.” 

There’s a lot they haven’t talked about since that night; Duane knows only what she’s told him, and Giles, for one, seems content believing that Elisa and her creature swam for watery freedom and that anyone who might have cause to menace them is either safely dead or ignorant of the role that each one of them played. He’s never asked how Dimitri came to be at Mercy General, and neither has she. And Dimitri hasn’t talked about it. She wasn’t entirely positive if he even remembered what happened to him.

One look in his eyes and it’s clear to her that he absolutely does.

“My countrymen shot me for blowing my cover and failing to complete the mission,” he says, voice flat and even. “But it was yours who broke me.” He’s staring past Giles, at Zelda. “Forgive me,” he tells her. “I gave you up to Strickland.”

His shoulders hunch, and he stares down at his hands, at their almost imperceptible tremor. She’s not used to seeing a white man look subservient. Ashamed. There were scars on his neck and shoulders when they’d rescued him; she’d barely noticed, with the severity of his other wounds, the urgent struggle to keep him alive. She doesn’t need to question where they came from; she’s seen what Strickland’s Alabama Howdy-do had done to the creature, armored and bigger and stronger than her friend. She can only imagine his savagery unleashed against Dimitri, already hurt and terrified, already so unsuited to this life of monsters and killers.

“You don’t need to think about that now, hon,” she says. “It’s in the past. There ain’t nothing you did that needs forgiving.”

“It’s not the pain,” Dimitri tells them. “It’s the fear. It’s wanting so badly to live, hoping against hope for mercy…”

Giles is pale, aghast. He gives into temptation and covers Dimitri’s shaking hands with his own. He’s too softhearted to have contemplated in any depth the cruelties that men are capable of visiting on each other, but Zelda isn’t. She can’t imagine Fleming having the stomach for torture, but she’s certain he’s got people working for him who do. Strickland was an exception only in that the ones on top, the ones with all the power, usually prefer to delegate.

“Thought you spy types had cyanide pills or something,” Duane says.

“I do.” Dimitri leans against Giles’ side. Zelda averts her eyes; she can’t begrudge either of them their peculiar, tender connection, but neither can she entirely silence Reverend Thomas’ warnings about hellfire and damnation. “It’s in a filling, in my back right molar. Unexpectedly hard to reach when someone is sticking his fingers through your face.”

She’s half-sure Giles—who she has personally witnessed taking a spider outside rather than squashing it—is about ready to dig up Strickland’s corpse just to kill him again. “You still _have it?_ ” he splutters.

Dimiti’s tongue moves along the inside of his cheek, past the horrible scar. She forces herself to watch. She could have stayed with Brewster, could have chosen a life of fried bacon and dripping faucets and church cookouts. Instead, here she is, plotting an uprising. The least she owes any of them is to stare the potential consequences straight in the face.

“Oh,” Dimitri says, “It’s still very much there. Let’s run through those codes again.”

 

* * *

 

It’s still another week before Fleming summons her. She is midway through emptying the wastepaper baskets in the row of offices on the second floor when two MPs come to get her. Her heart skips and stutters: first, with fear that she’ll be plunged into the deep, electrocuted and shot and worse still, fired; next, with the realization that this is the _moment_ , that Duane and the others are counting on her. 

She’s barely slept. Zelda is unprepared for the noise of Elisa’s apartment, the sounds from the street below, the muffled dialogue and rising orchestra scores from the 24-hour theater below. Why they need to play films when no one’s watching, she has no earthly idea, but Mr. Arzoumanian insists that it’s necessary, and he was, in the end, kind enough to accept Giles’ pronouncement that, like it or not, he now has a Negro janitor renting the second apartment, and given that no one else is desperate enough to move into it, he should be grateful for the rent money and leave it at that.

The stench gets to her too. She tries not to let it, but it seeps into every pore of her skin, and she’s terrified that someone will smell it on her, connect her to the Asset’s disappearance. A few of her precious waking, non-working hours are spent on her hands and knees, scrubbing every inch of the floors, but it rises up past the bleach and clings to her like a memory. At night, she dreams that she’s deep in the jungle, her feet sinking into the mud, the cries of tropical birds and monkeys ringing in her ears as she grasps at the spider web of branches above her. She ought to be comforted, to feel the presence of her friend and the creature she adored, but Zelda is reminded that love is a fierce and wild and frightening force as easily as it is a comforting one, and divine mysteries are not so easily tamed. 

David Fleming, a man firmly grounded in worldly matters, fusses with his tie, runs a nervous hand over his bald spot. He doesn’t seem to know where to look when he talks to her, and it’s a relief to see that he probably hasn’t slept much either, judging by the bags under his eyes.

Dimitri’s instructions echo in her mind. Appear reluctant. It’s fine to let your fear show. He will expect you to be scared, conflicted. Give the meeting time—she, Duane, and Lou have arranged a small, non-threatening gathering for him to break up—but don’t give it up right away. And never give up anything, not even false information, without getting something in return. 

She breathes in deeply. She mentions her church, how Rev. Thomas told her never to lie, to be a good worker and keep her nose clean and she has, sir, she’s done her best, but it’s all gotten so _complicated_. She even cries, and the tears aren’t faked. Rev. Thomas really wouldn’t be happy with her, but she tells herself that it’s for a greater good, and even if he doesn’t forgive her in the end, God will. She is meandering, she asks after Fleming’s family, she leads him on as many conversational tangents as she can manage, and she can see him tug at his mustache in frustration.

“I just want to go back to how things were,” she says, and he smiles, benevolent and paternalistic. The most convincing lies have a kernel of truth in them. She doesn’t need a Russian spy to tell her _that._ “I just don’t know how it all got so mixed up and crazy.”

He pats her hand from across the table. “Me too, Zelda,” Fleming says. “Me too.” 

He tells her that the higher-ups aren’t happy with the internal investigation. That there are too many loose ends—the Asset, Dr. Hoffstetler, and now these rumblings of union organizing, links to outside Communist agitators—and national security is on the line. The exchange, when it happens, feels as formal as a handshake. Zelda tells him the meeting time and place.

Fleming tells her that Hoyt is flying in tonight to oversee the investigation personally.


	14. Now That Your Lips Are Burning Mine

Christmas bashes its way in like a sledgehammer to Zelda’s chest.

Between the graveyard shift and the Bible films and the usual stresses brought about when one commits treason and mutiny, she has no clear sense of when days end and begin, so when she sees Christmas lights strung up over bare trees, it’s an unexpected ambush. Since the night at the dock, nothing has quite felt real, the orderly world she inhabited before, with its clocks and calendars and predictability, was drowned beneath the crashing waves along with Elisa. 

She should be at home with Brewster. She would have planned a meticulous Christmas dinner, placed a small but immaculately decorated tree in the corner of the living room, gone to church without the worm of guilt that she imagines will erupt from beneath her skin at any moment as she tries to sit still on the hard pew. Brewster would have found something for her at the last minute, cheap and inappropriate, like a nightgown that’s the wrong size or a teddy bear with a fringe of stains on its fur, and she would have loved him just a little more for his failures.

Instead, she hangs strings of cut paper over the spindly tree that Giles’ cats have already chewed and clawed half-bare, and the talk is less of the Baby Jesus and more of when to time the walkout itself—sooner, striking when the iron is hot, or later, in the hopes that they won’t be simply frozen into compliance.

OCCAM is nearly empty, the MPs on a skeleton crew, the scientists and engineers returned to their wives and children, laboring to build for them a sanctuary of fireplaces and pine, remote from the evils they commit. The workers are alone in the facility’s shell, cleaning haunted laboratories, footsteps echoing down abandoned corridors. It’s a good time to plot, were it not for the ever-present threat of Hoyt, lurking somewhere in the upper offices, and Duane’s restlessness is contagious, almost enough to make her forget her fear. She catches glimpses of the General now and then. If he has a family, they’re tucked away safely in whatever military fortress he emerged from; he is alone here, and has all the time in the world for his work.

Her solace, such that it is, is that her companions, in previous years, would have gone home to apartments even lonelier than her own. Duane was raised in foster care and as an adult, has barely spent a year or two in the same city. She doesn’t think they have Christmas in Soviet Russia, but surely Dimitri, in his many years in America, must have felt some pang of longing as he pretended to prepare for the holidays and instead, enclosed himself in a bare room, its walls scant protection against the possibility of exposure.

Only she and Giles are united in their loss. It’s the first Christmas without Elisa’s funny cards, without her childlike joy in a snowfall, the way the path leading to the facility would ice overnight and she would recover a slip into a whirling pirouette, her long winter coat flapping around her legs.

But inside Giles’ apartment, there’s one or two new cats, or at least cats she hasn’t noticed before, and Duane keeps squeezing her hand as they dance to Elisa’s records in the glow of an old musical playing on the television set. For the first time since she started visiting, an explosion of art blankets the easel, chair, and windowsill, not the bleak, repetitive water sketches, but portraits: her, Duane, and Dimitri, lying on the sofa, a sunbeam across his sleeping face, tilted to hide his scar, Dimitri with a book folded open over his chest and a cat curled into a circle at his side, Dimitri bent over Giles’ old radio with a screwdriver, the line work delicate, as if the stroke of his pen was the artist’s own fingertips, running with reverence over his muse. Intermingled amongst them are other drawings, these ones more precise, less emotional, but not without considerable talent, products of a restless mind trapped in amber.

There is a new painting mounted on the easel, this one nearing completion, a sinuous mermaid with Elisa’s face, her scales glittering jewels patterned in emerald and jade. She doesn’t know much about art but it’s the most beautiful painting she’s seen Giles create.

Between the four of them, there is little money for food and rent, let alone the turkey feast depicted in one or two of Giles’ ads, but she and Dimitri still spend the afternoon in Giles’ kitchen—Giles and Duane relegated to the living room, lest they interfere, allowed near the sink only to boil water for tea—working with what they can scrounge. She’s unaccustomed to the kitchen, to another set of equally skilled hands sharing the work, to the appreciative comments and laughter at the aroma from the kitchen floats up to the high ceilings. The cats keep jumping up on the counter and Dimitri scoops up each one, strokes it and scolds it in Russian, and then deposits it carefully on the floor, where Zelda sneaks it a scrap of chicken or two, and she realizes that she’s home, now.

Though Elisa’s ghost is as tangible a presence in the apartments as the paint peeling from the walls, she settles in on the sofa and lets Duane bring her a cup of tea while the casserole bakes in the oven. He puts his arm around her shoulders, the weight of it reassuringly solid, and she breathes in the scent of him, warm and real and alive, she sips her tea, and they tell stories, Giles’ bohemian days in New York, Duane’s education at the Highlander Folk School, Dimitri’s idyllic boyhood, wandering the Minsk Botanical Garden for hours. Her own life—the part she can talk about, anyway—has been so much less eventful, confined by the interlocking chains of work and church and family, and yet hasn’t she, too, seen miracles? Doesn’t she also live in extraordinary times?

At long last, she gets up to go to bed. “Walk you home?” Duane asks.

She’s not some naïve young girl; she knows damn well what he’s asking. She wonders whether she’s changed that much, whether, at thirty-three, she is at last willing to live a more dangerous life.

“Sure,” she says. “Why the hell not?” 

Duane kisses her the instant the door is shut; he is considerate, gentle—and Zelda has waited long enough. She’s shimmying out of her dress, fumbling with the buttons on his shirt, nearly tripping over her own feet in a rush to get them both to the bedroom.

But there, he stops her, stands at arm’s length, standing naked before him with her swollen toes and stretch marks. Grins his gap-toothed smile at her in frank appreciation.

“You are the most beautiful woman I have ever met,” Duane says, the goddamn charmer.

“You gonna sweet talk me all night, or you gonna prove you mean that?”

She must have cleaned the sheets half a dozen times since moving in, but as he lowers her onto the bed, she could swear she feels a thousand shimmering scales pressed into her skin, painting the planes of Duane’s face in bioluminescent azure. Her hands slide across his chest, his back, both of them covered in a thin sheen of sweat. Their bodies roll together, drown in each other, the creak of the old headboard banging out a syncopated rhythm against the water-damaged walls.

Afterwards, they share a cigarette, passing it back and forth as they lie in Elisa’s bed, propped up on Elisa’s pillows, breathing smoke-laced kisses into each other’s mouths.

His lips brush over the shell of her ear. “Merry Christmas, Zelda.”

This is the calm before the storm, and they both know it. Even now, she can feel Hoyt looming ahead of them, how small and feeble they both are before the United States military, its great minds and its powerful weapons. How foolish they are, to think that they can stand in the way of its utter domination of all life on Earth, of whatever is beyond, out there in the stars.

But here, in her best friend’s bed, Duane’s arms around her, smoke whirling and eddying above their heads, she feels as though she has woken from a long sleep. That, somehow, they might wake the whole world with them.

 

* * *

 

_“In both love and espionage,” Giles says, “smoking is an invaluable vice. It’s a hell of a lot of waiting if you abstain.”_

_You glance over at the man who was once Robert Hoffstetler, and before that, Dimitri Antonovich Mosenkov, whose fingers twitch, almost imperceptibly at the mention. “Oh_ he _quit years ago. The cancer thing, irrefutable evidence. Who’d have thought? But back in those days, it was a way of breaking the ice, of marking time, of filling in the spaces before trust has taken root. I wonder how anyone manages now.”_

_You leave him to his verbal meanderings, exploring instead the space of the room, the walls bare and white, the thundering of rain against the single window. It is a strange place to come to die. You barely understand death; you have seen beasts die, and once a whale, but never men. It does not seem a place that a man who lives surrounded by images and memories would have chosen._

_“There was,” Giles continues. “a lot of waiting, back then. And never quite enough cigarettes.”_

 

* * *

 

The uprising begins on a cold day in January, the sun a bright, distant speck sinking into the grey-washed sky.

It happens as the afternoon shift workers are leaving. They’ve waited for days, scouting out Hoyt’s movements. Scientists and soldiers alike are beginning to trickle back from the holidays. Zelda shivers in her winter coat as she makes her way down the path to the front doors, and it’s not just from the cold. There’s a line of workers punching in; she catches up to Yolanda near the front.

“You’re gonna want to put that down,” Zelda says. “It’s time.” 

Yolanda looks about like she’s ready to faint.

“I’m not making any trouble,” she hisses back.

Zelda claps her hands together. “It’s _time,_ ” she says, louder. She grabs Yolanda by the elbow. Her heart is ready to shatter her ribcage. She wishes Elisa were here. “Walk with me,” she whispers to Yolanda. “Trust me, you don’t wanna be on the wrong side of this.” Further down the hall, she can hear some of the men—she recognizes Lou’s voice, though she can’t hear Duane’s—shouting instructions at the workers who are still inside.

Then someone pulls the fire alarm and all hell breaks loose.

She grabs Yolanda and Lucille, who’s standing behind her, and drags them away from the front doors with all her strength. The alarm screams in her eardrums, the lights flashing on and off as the two soldiers race for the door, and she’s somehow holding the others back, the rush of cold air from the door turning her breath to wisps of steam. Lou runs to them after the last soldiers have fled and slams a crowbar through the door handles, sealing it closed. He grins at her. 

“This is an occupation!” he shouts. A few faces look puzzled. “Occupation means we don’t leave ‘til we get what we want.” She can barely hear him; her hands are firmly over her ears to muffle the screech of the alarm. “Nobody move.”

No one does. 

“Thank you,” Lou adds.

Well, he was never the sharpest tack, but he’s done all right. Zelda glances at him. He nods. It’s her turn. She feels the heat of dozens of eyes watching her. Duane is somewhere, maybe in the kitchen, rallying folks on the other side of the building. He’s planned, trained for this for years. She wants to protest that she’s just the cleaner, just a girl bereft, a girl in love, not some hardened revolutionary.

Still. The alarm falls silent. She clears her throat. “Okay,” Zelda says. A deep breath. “Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter dedicated to the fact that I saw the movie once and I'm mainly working from the script and thought that Giles only had three cats. Oops. Sorry, Thor! You are not forgotten.


	15. The Blues Walked In and Met Me

_“The OCCAM Sit-In, as it came to be known, lasted less than a week and was barely a footnote in the history of the Civil Rights Movement. But if it’s been forgotten by all but those who lived through it, it is testament not to its lack of success, but how truly tumultuous those times were.”_

 

* * *

 

“Please,” Giles begs, “put something else on. Just for a few minutes.” 

It takes several attempts (remove cat from lap, try to stand, fail to summon the momentum required for standing, remove cat that has crawled back on lap, succumb to guilt at disturbing the cat and give her a few scratches before pushing off the seat) for Dimitri to climb to his feet, white-knuckle his way around the sofa, leaning heavily on its armrest, and limp to the window, where Giles is trying to paint despite the distraction of the television. An hour ago, it was blaring scenes from OCCAM where lines of trucks are attempting to bring in supplies past the line of soldiers outside, and Dimitri awaits an update. The program has moved on now, train collisions and avalanches and mine explosions. Dimitri avoids the television dial. Something could happen at OCCAM, interrupting the endless barrage of human tragedy, each catastrophe reduced to a calmly read news item with a sharp spike of terror. 

 _And then you will do what, exactly,_ he asks himself. _Rush in, save the day?_ Him, a wounded, wanted man, and Giles, who has never so much as picked up a gun in his life, against all the might of the US military? They would have to try, he knows they would, and they would die. No one is getting in or out of the facility. Dimitri hasn’t been able to sleep for more than a few hours at a time, or eat, or think about anything else since Zelda and Duane went in to OCCAM and didn’t come out. 

He should be there. It’s his workplace too, or at least it was, his revenge to take as much as theirs. Have the lies he’s told, the trust he’s betrayed, the blood spilled—that of others’, and his own—not been in service of the very cause that his friends are now fighting for?

A lifetime ago, he was given to pacing and chain smoking. Now, he keeps an unsteady grip on the window frame, forcing his twitching fingers to still and his breath out in even exhales. There’s pain all up and down his side. His right leg drags when he walks. It’s better than it was a month ago, when he couldn’t even sit up unaided, but he’s not healing quickly enough. He’s a biologist; he knows that nerves severed and muscle lacerated by the bullet’s trajectory and the surgeon’s scalpel won’t be the same, even given more time than he has. Still, he bristles with frustration at his own body’s disloyalty.

“We need to _do_ something.”

Giles stabs his canvas with an angry brushstroke. His latest mermaid is wild, emerging from crashing waves so fierce as to be nearly abstract.

“What do you think we _did?_ ”

Giles turns, at last, towards him, stricken, the lines beneath his eyes deep gashes of shadow. For the first time since Dimitri awoke in his bed, he looks every single one of his years.

“They had no business going in there like that,” Giles says. “What did they think would happen, taking over government property? And we _encouraged_ them.”

 _I did,_ Dimitri thinks. _I encouraged them._ Whatever Duane’s goals were—whatever the movement’s had been long before the military recruiter had brought Dr. Robert Hoffstetler to OCCAM—Dimitri had helped them coordinate their strategy on the ground. Or, more to the point, he hadn’t terrified them enough to stop them from doing it. 

And now he can’t help them. If only he could still call on Mihalkov—but, no. Mihalkov would never have jeopardized their cover over a doomed protest, no matter how much potential Dimitri saw in it. No matter that the workers’ cause was just. It would have been too small, too local, while the fate of the world hung in the balance. 

But then, why the mission at all? What was the point of gaining the moon, a cold lifeless rock, before America did, if it meant abandoning one’s comrades here on Earth?

“I thought it was the right thing to do,” Dimitri says.

“What changed?”

“Fleming is a weak man. Small. When it was just him…they might have won. But Hoyt. _Strickland_ was afraid of Hoyt.”

He staggers on his feet, and Giles is up in an instant, arms around him, rubbing his back. Dimitri falls into him, taking the weight off his leg, his face buried in Giles’ cardigan. 

“You worked in advertising, you must know people, media people…”

Giles pets his hair, and he’d be irritated if he didn’t desperately long for every bit of comfort the other man was willing to bestow on him.

“My dear boy,” Giles says. “All these years in America, and you still haven’t learned how it works here.” He kisses Dimitri’s forehead, bends his head downwards, and Dimitri feels the dampness of tears against his hairline. He wants to be angry—what good are tears? But then, what good is any of his worrying? He hugs Giles, thinks that maybe they’re each the only thing holding the other up. 

“Nothing changes,” Giles tells him. “Nothing ever changes.”

 

* * *

 

OCCAM, emptied of most of its usual inhabitants, is a ghost town. The comparison is not merely fanciful—the facility, at its peak, is a city unto itself, food shipped in, laundry and waste shipped out, a minor ecosystem of rulers, enforcers, and those who service the first two groups. With the former two gone, the latter spends much of the first evening scattered and disorganized, kept in line only by the sheer determination of Duane’s inner circle. 

The strike does not spare Zelda’s feet. Even more than Duane, she is known and trusted by most of the workers, and so she’s enlisted as a messenger to travel between each of the facility’s doors before a general meeting to be called at midnight. Her toes are already stinging, shooting lightning bolts of pain up and down her soles, as she limps between the fire exit and receiving.

She pauses, before she even has time to think about it, at the door to T-4. It’s unlocked. There’s nothing to see here anymore, not even a splash of saltwater, nor a speck of blood. The day shift had taken care of that; by the time she’d punched in the night after they lost Elisa, it was as if no one had ever set foot in there. 

Oh, she knows damn well that’s her imagination and not the scratch of a needle on a jazz record, but she still shuts the doors, slumps, gasping, in the corridor outside. Some memories are best left undisturbed. 

“Get movin’, girl,” she tells herself, trudging on towards receiving. It’s the most dangerous door, the most easily breached, so there are three guys guarding it, armed, respectively, with a crowbar, a broken off broom handle ( _someone’s gonna have to pay for that,_ Zelda thinks), and a hammer that’s seen better days.

“Meeting in an hour,” she mumbles, with barely a wave. And what are they supposed to do about it? OCCAM has thick walls and metal doors, and it’s defensible to a point, but there aren’t that many of them to guard it. All the army needs to do is wait them out, until the food in the cafeteria’s all used up, until they’re too exhausted and hungry to keep all the doors guarded, all at once.

“Zelda!”

It’s frail, pallid Lucille, who once passed out from bleach fumes and is nevertheless dragging along a wrench the length of her arm, her pale hair tied back in a bun and the sleeves of her uniform rolled up above her shoulders. Grateful for the opportunity to just stop moving, Zelda sags against the wall and waits for Lucille to catch up. 

“Can you believe this?” Lucille waves her makeshift weapon for emphasis. Zelda takes a step back, in case she misses. “What a day, huh?”

“Day’s not over yet,” Zelda replies grimly.

“I bet Fleming is wigging out right now.” This is accompanied by a girlish giggle, as if they were playing a schoolgirl prank and not a dangerous game of chicken with an army general. “Say, you look tired.”

“Got two more doors to go,” Zelda says, “and my feet are killin’ me.” 

The little wisp of a girl gapes at her, like she’s something more than a tired janitor who wants badly to be in a warm apartment cradling a cold beer. “This was you? _All_ this was _you?_ ” 

“Some of it was me,” Zelda clarifies.

Lucille throws her arms around Zelda; she can feel the cold metal of the wrench pressing against her spine. Zelda is terrified and it’s the most exciting day of Lucille’s life.

“Someone had to stand up to them,” Lucille says. “Gosh. Always figured you were too much of a Goody Two-Shoes. That’ll show me!” She grins. Each of her teeth is set a little apart from its neighbors, like they grew in too small, a wide, gummy smile. “Tell me how I can help.”

Zelda has been working in the dark, in secret, for a month that’s seemed like a century. It’s easy to forget that she’s not alone in this. That she’s never, really, been alone.

“Well, for starters,” she says, “we gotta spread the word to two more doors.”

 

* * *

 

They meet in the cafeteria, clustered around the tables. Zelda catches Duane’s eye from where he stands at the back with Lou, but now’s not the time to stage a reunion. He winks and a little bubble of pleasure bursts in her, making her stand just a bit straighter.

Of course, it’s all chaos for the first five minutes or so, everyone talking at once and over each other, and her head is spinning so hard she needs to brace herself on the table. They’re all excited, and scared, and full of so much hope for things she knows they can never have. Finally Duane shouts for them all to shut the hell up.

“Here’s how this goes,” he says. “We need a list of demands. Now, me and Lou and Zelda here—” She blushes, turns away. “—we worked out a communication system for y’all. We gotta guard the doors in shifts. Each shift gets a whistle. You run into any trouble, you do this.” He demonstrates. She sees some of the workers echo it in taps on the table or on their thighs. Lou is taking count of everyone present—including the people currently guarding the doors, Zelda herself counts two dozen or so from the graveyard shift, five or six more of the day shift who’d managed to sneak in through the fire escape overnight. Not enough for a revolution, not enough to keep the doors secured, not for long. She tunes in and out as shifts are assigned and demands are drawn up. 

She’s assigned to kitchen duty first, and is given the task of leading the inventory and rations. Yolanda grumbles that it’s mostly women in the group, even though all of the actual kitchen staff is male, but Duane’s with them too, so Zelda saves her criticism for later. It’s twelve hours into the occupation, and the first time since the doors slammed shut that she’s been in close quarters with him.

Zelda stands a few feet away from him in the kitchen. Should she run to him? Kiss him? He’s the acknowledged leader of the protest—does she endanger him by exposing their affair? Does she endanger herself?

She and the others sort through the food. OCCAM gets bi-weekly deliveries; the facility is designed to withstand war or civil upheaval, and if they’re careful, they can stretch their supplies out to last. It will be more difficult with laundry. Since Lucille’s accident, they outsource the laundry service, and she knows that a day or two without a clean change of clothes is enough to break most anyone.

Zelda chides herself for excessive optimism the moment she says it out loud. As if they’ll be allowed to continue for even another day or two.

“That’s good,” Duane says, as if her second thoughts wouldn’t have occurred to him too. “You’re thinking like an organizer. Like a strategist.”

“I mop floors for a living,” Zelda insists.

They’re both on their knees, arranging sacks of flour in the shadow of the counter. He stretches across the barricade between them to kiss her lips; nearly chaste, were it not for the gleam of mischief in his eyes. 

“For now,” Duane says.

 

* * *

 

Police and soldiers swarm around metal barricades and sandbags. From his van, Giles watches as a news crew sets up a bulky camera, at a handful of student demonstrators who have come laden with shopping bags and picket signs, only to be turned away. Even at a distance, he can see the glint of the sun off the steel of the soldiers’ guns. 

What is he even doing here?

Worse still, what is _Zelda_ doing there?

He watches as an armored car rolls up to the line of soldiers. He remembers a brief foray into set design in his youth, how the costumers would weave sequins into the leading lady’s dress to make her glitter when the stage lights hit. The medals on the uniform of the man who steps out of the back seat have a similar effect. 

General Hoyt. He’s ordering commands to his troops. Giles is too far away to lip read, but everything in the man’s posture and bearing tells him that he’s here to take control, to quash the nascent uprising before it goes any farther. Whatever the soldiers say to him in response clearly makes him unhappy. 

Giles shivers, his coat and layers of wool no longer enough to keep him warm. He folds his arms over the steering wheel, and watches as, outside of OCCAM, Hoyt prepares for war.


	16. No More Pint Of Salt For Me

Zelda, lying on a too-thin, too-narrow mattress, can’t sleep. She can feel the floor hard under her side. There’s a rolled up coat for a pillow between her and Duane, and the blanket doesn’t stretch from his feet to her face. The cold air on her nose wakes her every time she starts to drift off. She’ll never complain about the traffic noises or the Bible movies blaring from the Arcade again.

That is, she thinks, if she ever makes it out of here.

OCCAM is hermetically sealed from the outside world, its walls too thick for sound to penetrate. Sometimes they crowd around the radio in the cafeteria, but Zelda does her best to avoid it, having caught speculation, on one report, that Hoyt had asked Governor Tawes to call in the National Guard. If they’re able to bash in the doors, she tells herself, the ragged band of rebels is already doomed.

She slides out from under Duane’s arm, shivering, and picks up her cardigan, wrapping it over her uniform. She only has that uniform and the dress she was wearing when she punched in last evening, and she’s saving the latter for the moment laundry can’t be put off any longer. The sweater is cold from lying on the ground, and she hugs herself, sliding into her—also far too cold, far too pinching—shoes.

Half a dozen other workers sleep in the cafeteria. There are endless rooms and laboratories and empty hallways, but the primeval instinct to huddle together for safety prevails. She steps quietly around them, and the snores drown out her footsteps. She traces her fingers along the familiar walls.

The facility, stripped of its purpose, is silent. In Elisa’s absence, it has become her mausoleum, her final sly joke at their expense. She is gone and she has gathered up all the sound and taken it with her. Now, words are rationed as strictly as flour.

In what was once Strickland’s office, the telephone rings. Duane made the mistake of answering yesterday—the first time to be met with Fleming’s barked orders to open the door, the second, to shout back their list of demands back before the receiver slammed into its cradle on the other side. Now, someone on the outside has been enlisted to just call constantly, to keep everyone awake and on edge, underestimating the scale of the building and its soundproofing. The ringing merely annoys the guards at one of the doors, who sing and chant and clap over it, and is nearly impossible to hear from the cafeteria. She wants to pick it up, not to answer their tormentors but in the hopes of reaching the outside world, to hear Giles’ voice, Dimitri’s—despite the latter’s warning to avoid the telephone, that someone is always listening.

Strickland’s office was emptied after his death, incriminating documents seized and shredded, but since then, Hoyt claimed the space. The General is a paranoid man; all of the desk drawers are locked, though there’s a requisition form for some kind of specialized equipment with his signature left on the desk. She has no idea what it’s for, but it’s a big sum of money. The workers have been talking about pennies, 30 cents an hour more for everyone, 70 cents more for the black staff once they all sat around in a circle and discovered how much they were each making for the same job. One piece of equipment, a string of letters and numbers for some obscure purpose, is worth more than any of them make in a year.

She can’t even properly hate them. Without Hoyt, or Fleming, or even Strickland, it would be some other beast with the face of a man, reducing love and suffering and discovery and drudgery alike to numbers on a report. What have they ever made here, in these laboratories, except someone else’s misery?

Zelda folds the paper into her pocket. She tries each office door, glancing as she does at the security cameras. None of them are on; disconnecting them was one of the first things they did, and she feels a tremendous freedom, as if law and custom both had been suspended, as if she were a woman alone in a world abandoned. She drifts through what was once OCCAM, gathering what evidence she can. It belongs to them now, to her and Duane and Yolanda and Lucille and Lou and all the others, dormant but restless and brimming with potential.

She stands, at last, in Strickland’s office, overlooking the ground floor laboratory where rows of bulky equipment lie quiescent, the telephone ringing to life, and she presses her palms to the glass. She knows they’ll lose, that they never had any chance of winning, but Strickland is dead and his mission has failed and she’s still here, she’s still standing and breathing OCCAM’s stale air, and that in itself feels like victory.

 

* * *

 

The second night of the OCCAM Sit-In sees a minor revolt.

It seems that the manifesto was written primarily by the men who work in the cafeteria and receiving, with little input by any of the female cleaning staff. Meanwhile, the kitchen and the cafeteria kept clean by women, with little help from any of the men. Lou argues that this is because the men are busy guarding the doors, to which Yolanda makes a pointed but anatomically improbable suggestion, and Lucille pipes up that the doors are already sealed shut with crowbars and so it hardly takes brute strength to guard them. 

It devolves from there. Zelda doesn’t know why she ever thought that being on strike would be less work than she did before. 

She makes her way to the center table, now functioning as a makeshift podium, and climbs up beside Duane and Lou, no easy task with her short, tired legs. She takes a deep breath and blows her whistle as loud and long as she can.

Everyone falls silent. She feels dozens of eyes on her, and realizes she has no idea what do say or do next. 

“Shut up,” she says. “All you, just shut up for a second so I can _think_.”

She’s never been one for big, longwinded speeches. Truth be told, she’s not used to being listened to at all, except by Elisa, and it wasn’t like the girl had a choice in that.

“Did all of you just forget that the enemy’s out there? And here we are fightin’ amongst ourselves like they ain’t just waiting for a chance to beat down those doors and arrest us all.” She meets Duane’s eyes. He nods. “Y’all get paid less than a white man, but we—“ Zelda gestures towards the huddle of women. “—get paid less than a black man. That ain’t right and that ain’t in the demands. We’re all taking the same risk here.”

“You wanna take a turn at guarding the doors, Zelda?” Antonio shouts out. Several of the other men laugh. 

“Yeah,” she fires back. “So what if I do? Far as I can see, there’s been just one person in this goddamn place ever hit the bastards where it hurt, and she was helluva lot scrawnier than you or me.” She bends down, one hand on her hip, and picks up the scrawled list of their demands, shaking it in the air. “We all stand by what’s in here or what’s the point of any of it? So it’s gotta be for all of us. And we _all_ gotta do _all_ the jobs. Writing _and_ cleaning _and_ fighting. That’s how it’s gonna go.” _All of us, together,_ she signs, and though no one else understands, Duane and some of the others repeat the gesture, and then everyone’s doing it, and she ducks down to rejoin the other women before anyone can see the tears glistening in her eyes.

Duane slides up beside her. “Should I be getting you a crowbar too?”

“I’d prob’ly be better with one than Antonio.”

“I bet you would be.” She feels his hand, broad and warm, at the small of her back. “C’mon. You make speeches, you gotta help re-write the demands.” 

She’s about to head back for the table when he spins her, like they’re dancing again, and bends down to kiss her, right there in front of everyone. There’s no mistaking it for friendly, either; it’s a big, silver screen kiss, her fingers reaching automatically for the short hairs at the back of his neck, his breath warm and soft into her mouth. She hears Yolanda gasp and Lucille titter but she’s not ashamed, not anymore. The old order is falling apart, after all, and what use is a strike for freedom if she can’t have it all, even if it’s only for a few, sweet moments?

 

* * *

 

Yolanda’s monitoring the telephone in Strickland’s office. It’s the worst job, in Zelda’s opinion, even worse than cleaning the toilets. She can’t stand the sound, and whoever’s on the other side keeps it up all night, just calling and hanging up. They’d take it off the hook but they called as many radio and television stations as they could think of with their list of demands, and it’s possible that someone might call back wanting to interview them. When she comes running, her skirt flapping around her legs, Zelda thinks that’s what it’s about. 

Instead, Yolanda is calling for her.

“It’s Fleming,” she says. “He’s saying you should come outside.”

 

* * *

 

“Why me?”

Zelda stands in front of the mirror in the women’s change room fixing her wig. Duane has enough respect to stand out of view, by the door, but she can feel his impatience even without him in her line of sight.

“Because you agreed to spy for him?” Duane suggests, but the teasing is gone from his voice. He’s all business, puffing at a cigarette he’s broken in half in an attempt to stretch out his supply.

She leans out around the lockers to where he’s standing. “Gimme a puff of that.” Zelda draws the smoke down into her lungs, savoring its burn. “How do we know they ain’t just gonna gun us down the minute we open the doors?”

His face says that he’s wondering the same thing. “You don’t need to do this.”

“Yeah,” Zelda says. “I do.” There are dark circles under her eyes; nothing to be done about that. She checks her lipstick in the mirror. Might as well look good if she’s going to die in front of the television cameras. Satisfied, she wraps her arms around Duane and buries her head against his chest. His heart is hammering against her ear. She could stay here like this, wrapped up in him, forever, but he’s not the only one who’s counting on her. 

_I’m doing this, Elisa._ A prayer, sent not upwards but outwards, to the Patapsco River, flowing out into the unforgiving Atlantic. But prayers never did her much good. She straightens her shoulders and breaks away, strides beneath row after row of harsh fluorescent tubes with more confidence than she feels.

Duane tags after her until she’s almost at the door. She’s decided on the fire exit, both because it’s less vulnerable than the main entrance and because, if she walks out to the front, no one will be watching Lucille, sneaking out to deposit the reports that Zelda has stolen into the dead drop that she and Dimitri had worked out, a city planter across the parking lot.

Zelda straightens the collar of her coat. Yolanda is on shift at the door, unable to completely suppress a scowl. She’s taken to security duty better than one might think, but Zelda thinks that, given half the chance, the other woman would still brain her with the frying pan she’s carrying over past perceived slights.

Instead, they nod to each other. She wants to take refuge in Duane, cling to him, delay the moment for every second she can, but too many people are counting on her. She slides her gloves on, and palms forward, fingers splayed out, as non-threatening as she can be, steps through the door and out into the cold. 

Each snowflake, lit by the giant floodlights that ring the facility, is a shard of shrapnel where it collides with her face. She sees Lucille, a bright little speck, dart in the other direction, but the soldiers’ eyes are all on her. Fleming, fussy and nervous, runs towards her. Hoyt moves more slowly, surrounded by a cluster of MPs, and she can all but see the strings controlling Fleming in one of his huge hands.

Fleming, though, is all concern. “Zelda, are you safe?” He calls for someone to get her a blanket. She’s cold enough that the gesture almost seems kind. 

“They got no idea,” she says. All she needs to do is stall. Let Lucille get the information out. Let Fleming draw his own conclusions. Most important, get the manifesto out there, on TV if she can. “They sent me out to give you this.” She reaches into her pocket and hands him a copy of the list of demands. Past the line of MPs, she sees a small protest. Marchers are walking with pickets up and down, yelling to be let through. It hadn’t occurred to her before now that anyone outside OCCAM would care about the plight of those inside.

“We need to get her out of here,” Fleming says. He’s talking to Hoyt, who has approached them so quietly she didn’t even notice him coming. 

“The hell we do.” Hoyt turns his full attention on her. “How many are in there?”

“I—I don’t know, sir.” It’s not hard to sound scared when she’s this terrified. “It’s hard to count, and everyone keeps moving around…” Movement out of the corner of her eye. Lucille, heading back into the building. She focuses on the reporter, currently interviewing one of the soldiers. “Are we gonna be on TV? Brewster, he won’t know where I am, he thinks I’ve just gone to work and never come back.”

Fleming pats her shoulder. “We’ll contact him.”

“Who’s the leader?”

“I don’t know him. He just started working here, maybe a couple months ago. I think he’s in receiving, on the day shift.” It won’t make any sense, and she can only pray that it doesn’t match anyone who actually works there. But it might stall them; the employee records, as far as she knows, are kept on the premises and nowhere else.

“White, Negro, Spanish…?”

“White,” Zelda says, more confidently. Too confidently? She can tell that Fleming swallows whatever she tells him, but Hoyt will be more skeptical. He’ll assume she’s lying. “There’s a lot of people in there who’re real scared, Mr. Fleming. What’re you gonna do?”

Fleming’s mouth opens in a small O under his snow-flecked moustache, but Hoyt interrupts before he can speak. “That’s none of your concern,” he snaps. “You just stay nice and quiet and calm when we do.”

“You can’t be thinking of letting her go back in there!” Fleming protests.

“We’ll call her back out when we need her.”

“I want your assurances—”

“Need I remind you that you’re the one who let this situation get out of control?”

Zelda lets their argument drift over her. It’s of no consequence; Fleming is a pushover, and if Hoyt wants his assault on the occupied building, that’s what he’ll get. The important thing is the manifesto, and the papers she sent out with Lucille. She waits for the reporter to look her way, lets a second copy of the demands flutter down to the ground, just in case Fleming doesn’t pass it on to the press. She’s escorted back to the door between two burly MPs.

The instant she’s back inside, she blurts whatever information she can, the vehicles, what the guns look like, every word she managed to catch. The line of troops and the protesters trying to bring them food and supplies. And then Duane catches up to her and she clutches his hands, so warm in contrast to her own. If she could lose herself in his warmth, his strength, she would.

“Did Lucille get back?” she gasps between kisses. He nods. It’s all they can do, fight on every front they have available to them, pray that someone out there is listening, that they are strong enough, together, to outlast the storm.


	17. To Share a Kiss the Devil Has Known

Dimitri’s progress is slow and perilous over the icy ground. He picked a bad night for his first venture outside of Giles’ apartment. The city is blanketed in a thin sheen of snow that obscures him from unfriendly eyes but makes his cane slide to one side when he leans on it too heavily.

“When I bought that for you,” Giles says, “I thought we’d take a walk around the block. Not go to the place you’re most likely to be recognized and arrested.”

Dimitri is just happy to feel the cold air on his face. But he has a mission to complete. The story that ended up running on the television is anodyne, a labor dispute involving some unruly Negroes at an aerospace research facility, and it takes poring through the pages of every daily in the city before Dimitri even found the printed manifesto. But the code was there, clear as day, and he’s overcome with pride. He knows Zelda is an intelligent woman, but it’s one thing to possess a keen intellect and quite another to remember a complicated cipher under pressure. He should know.

Reflexively, he reaches up to tug the brim of Giles’ hat down over his face, hoping the shadows hide his scar. They’re both dressed like some film noir version of spies, long coats and homburgs and it probably makes them even more conspicuous, but he can hardly help it if Giles’ fashion sense is two decades out of date and his own clothes are trapped in his apartment behind a strip of police tape. Though, Dimitri decides, it’s a good look on Giles, at least.

“I don’t believe they’re looking in my direction at the moment,” Dimitri says with more certainty than he feels. He has never considered himself a brave man—despite all his ambitions and the dangerous games for which he so enthusiastically and naïvely volunteered—but something about these odd, lonely Americans he has befriended brings the courage out in him. “Besides, how many times in your life have you lived dangerously?”

“Not much at all, I’m afraid,” Giles admits. His eyes, catching the floodlights, gleam with mischief. “And almost all of those times seem to involve you.”

Dimitri laughs, then almost trips over the uneven ground, but Giles steadies him with a quick hand on his elbow.

“You should be in bed.”

“I hope to be, soon enough.” They reach the dead drop. A row of three cement planters, each bearing a spindly black tree stripped of leaves, guards the edge of the parking lot. The blocky, water-stained concrete reminds him, with an unexpected twinge of nostalgia, of home. OCCAM itself almost could be in Minsk for all its impressive Socialist Modernist angles; perhaps it is fitting that, after so many numbing, isolated years in America, it was here he came alive again.

The snow accumulated on one of the planters is indented; he digs into it with bare fingers until he touches paper. He tugs it free, finding sheets of week-old newspaper wrapped in a bundle, which he quickly hides in the inside pocket of his borrowed coat.

They should go. Soldiers patrol the perimeter of the building—on the other side of the parking lot, certainly, but close enough that he can see them moving back and forth, the puff from their breaths and the smoke from their cigarettes. He is not so arrogant as to assume that they’re still looking for him, but neither is he one to tempt fate.

“Flashlight,” he says to Giles, who grudgingly hands it to him. He has to shake it a few times to turn it on, nearly blinding both of them when it at last sputters to life. He doesn’t know if anyone is looking through the long row of dark windows that ring OCCAM’s bulk, let alone if Zelda is, but he flashes the beam in their direction just in case.

With the utmost of care, he places a red high-heeled shoe in the snow on top of the dead drop. If Zelda looks down, even from a distance, she can’t fail to miss it, the one spot of color in a sprawling wasteland of white and grey. It is a bourgeois extravagance, this dead woman’s shoe collection, but against the brutal cement, it nonetheless reminds Dimitri of the scarlet flags at a May Day parade. Perhaps it will be enough to lift Zelda’s spirits.

He can see Giles’ eyes move over the lines of the shoe, its slope and curves, its bright defiance a siren song to an artist. There are tears frozen on his cheeks. This time, it’s Dimitri who takes his arm.

“Let’s go home,” he says.

 

* * *

 

Giles can see Dimitri tense as he sorts through the papers, thick eyebrows knitting together, mouth creasing into a lopsided frown. He sweeps Lilly off the coffee table with the back of one arm when she hops up to investigate, barely even glancing at the cat he normally dotes upon. He’s so focused on whatever he’s reading that Giles is afraid to interrupt. 

“Is it as scintillating as it looks?” Giles regrets the attempt at levity the instant the words are out of his mouth. Dimitri looks up at him. The jagged red scar on his cheek stands out against his pale skin. He swallows, and Giles watches the movement of his throat.

“These are weapons, Giles,” he says. “Missiles, bombs, guidance systems. Many of them.”

“Nuclear bombs?” He tries to picture Hiroshima in Baltimore, charred corpses, shadows burned into walls. His normally vivid imagination is of little use. His city has shrunk, over the years, to his apartment, the Arcade, Dixie Doug’s, Klein & Saunders. Even the latter two have faded to mere abstraction. His world has become too small to incinerate.

“Does it matter?” Dimitri shakes the already-crumpled papers. “OCCAM would be of no interest to Moscow if its purpose was purely scientific. Of course, everything there is meant to destroy. The airplanes. The Asset. Even the rockets are Nazi weapons, repurposed to carry us to the Moon. But this is not research. This—” He stabs a column of numbers with his index finger. “ _This_ is stockpiling for a war.”

Giles’ hand hovers just above Dimitri’s back. He wants to touch him, comfort him, but Dimitri looks brittle enough to snap in half at the slightest pressure. “President Kennedy is not about to bomb Russia.”

“And if these are meant to fall on some other country? Will their victims be any less dead?” He stands, shakily, brushing cat hair from his sweater and searching around for his cane. “I must inform Comrade Mihalkov.”

“Comrade Mihalkov, as in the man who shot you?” 

“Not exactly.” Dimitri gathers the papers back into a stack. “But he will not be happy to see me breathing. I imagine he will take measures to correct the situation. I can only hope it will be after he has listened to what I have to tell him.”

“Dimitri.” He isn’t incapacitated, but he’s weak and clearly in pain, shaky as he struggles to balance with the cane. Giles could stop him easily enough. He doesn’t. “This is—”

“What? Treason? You know what I am. Where my loyalties lie. This has not changed.” 

Giles would have thought that three bullet wounds would have at least changed _something,_ but by now he knows better than to underestimate how stubborn his companion can be _._ He moves around to face Dimitri. Carefully, he takes the papers and places them back on the table, then brings his hands to rest lightly on the other man’s shoulders. 

“Are you so unhappy here,” he murmurs, “that you’re willing to throw your life away at the soonest opportunity?”

Dimitri blinks, his eyes wide and startled, as if he is only now remembering where he is, what has happened to him. Who he is with. His free hand reaches up to wrap around Giles’ and lower it to his chest. They’re inches away from each other, and Giles can feel both their hearts racing.

“I am,” Giles says, “a foolish old man who, against all odds, has found someone to love in his dotage. Forgive me if I’m unwilling to let him go without a fight.”

“This isn’t about me.” His voice is the aftermath of a massacre, a burned-out wreckage. “I know I’ll never return home. I’ve made my peace with it. But I cannot stand by while it is destroyed.” His fist tightens around the handle of the cane. “I once saw a test where they gave a rhesus monkey a device that would release food pellets, but in doing so, shock a monkey in the cage next to it. The monkeys starved for days, rather than hurt their fellows. Rats, too, even _Globitermes sulphureus_ —that’s a type of termite, Giles—will sacrifice themselves to save another. There are _invertebrates_ more ethical than these men.” 

Giles gives into temptation and pulls him closer, cradling the back of his head, rubbing up and down his neck. Dimitri, still unused to being touched, held, gives in, though he shakes with cold fury in Giles’ embrace. 

“They’ll kill you,” Giles insists. 

“Probably,” Dimitri agrees.

“And Zelda.”

He feels Dimitri stiffen. “What about Zelda?” 

“What do you think they’ll do to the woman who leaked that information? The _black woman janitor_.” He doesn’t specify who “they” might be. The Reds, the government, it doesn’t matter. The rest of the world has always been allied against people like them. “As long as their occupation goes on, no one’s bringing weapons in or out of there. You said you’d help them.”

“I _am_ helping them.” But he’s not even attempting to struggle now. He lets Giles guide him away from the coffee table, towards the Murphy bed. It’s cruel, he knows it’s cruel, posing the choice this way. Balanced against the fate of the world and the enormity of nuclear destruction, even the bombing of some muddy Southeast Asian village, Dimitri would give his own life in an instant. He is much less nonchalant with Zelda’s. “If you’re right, if this is a war, there are dozens of places like OCCAM all over the country preparing for it, each no doubt with dozens of spies and dozens of Mihalkovs keeping tabs on them. It doesn’t all rest on you.” Dimitri makes a small, agonized sound, and it’s a terrible thing, to pray for some other stranger to betray his country so that he can keep his lover safe, but perhaps Dimitri is right, perhaps it’s only traitors and spies who are cautious enough to step carefully when all life on Earth is at stake, who keep their leaders from the brink of war.

Dimitri sits on the edge of the bed, hands braced as if to curl into fists at any moment. His eyes are wild, but he’s frozen in place, and Giles’ light, careful touches are enough to keep him still. “Can we at least sleep on it?” he asks. “You’re not going to track down Mihalkov at three in the morning.” 

“I could find him,” Dimitri says grimly, but starts unbuttoning his shirt. 

“May I? Your shoulder…” 

Dimitri responds with a little bob of his head, which despite the circumstances, Giles can’t help but find charming. Giles takes his time stripping off his shirt, appreciating the way his own body is faster to respond to the other man’s presence than it might have been a few months ago. He runs his fingers over the knot of scar tissue on Dimitri’s shoulder, gently at first, then harder when Dimitri moans in relief. He peels off Dimitri’s undershirt, feels him shrink back as the ruin of his body is exposed. Giles wants to tell him that it’s not that bad, but he understands vanity far too well. Kneeling—is it his imagination, or do his knees bend more easily, too?—he presses a soft kiss to the scar on Dimitri’s abdomen, slowly follows the pale, jagged path of the scalpel up Dimitri’s belly and chest with his lips. Dimitri shivers under him.

“You are trying to distract me.”

“Is it working?”

In response, Dimitri grabs the collar of his shirt and drags Giles up on the bed beside him, slides a hand behind his neck to draw him into a long, lingering kiss. Their explorations thus far have been timid, halting, limited by Dimitri’s pain and Giles not-exactly-unjustified fear of breaking him. He lets Dimitri set the pace, gives himself over to the younger man’s lead.

“Say my name,” Dimitri whispers. “Please.”

Giles obliges, first affectionately, then, as their bodies and tongues and fingers slide together, desperately, until it becomes a mantra, until Dimitri—“ _Dima,”_ he hisses, “call me Dima” _—_ is all he can gasp, all he can see and smell and taste, his entire world submerged within one being.

It is an old man’s indulgence, but nevertheless, he drifts into absurd fantasies that this infuriating, wonderful creature will stay with him, for a lifetime, forever, that the world that has hounded them both nearly to death will not come knocking at his door.

_(“We managed it anyway, somehow.” Giles coughs into a tissue. This time, there’s a streak of red, though he does his best to conceal it from Dimitri’s watchful eyes. “I’m sorry that I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain.”)_

He spends the night in a feverish haze, tangled with Dimitri in his worn sheets, Dimitri murmuring in his ear, sometimes English, sometimes Russian belatedly translated: “ _What shall I do with this body they gave me, / so much my own, so intimate with me? / For being alive, for the joy of calm breath, / tell me, who should I bless?”_ 1 And, at long last, drifting asleep with his head pillowed on Giles’ chest, one arm draped around him, and it’s only then that Giles realizes that since he left Russia, none of his lovers would have known his real name. He kisses Dimitri’s forehead before following him into sleep.

Somewhere, powerful men are making plans and calculations, when to posture and when to deploy the troops, when to shake hands with fingers crossed behind their backs. But the bombs, destined to fall sometime, somewhere, won’t arrive in OCCAM’s hangar bay. Not that night.

 

* * *

 

The interior of Klein & Saunders is too bright, too modern, after so much time confined to his apartment. There’s a new secretary at the front desk. This one is younger than the last one. Prettier, in a generic sort of way. Bernie always did favor a glossed-over, stilted version of female beauty, remote, untouchable Galateas more ornament than human. She asks Giles if he has an appointment, but before he can answer, Bernie appears around the corner, chatting animatedly with a client. He pales a little as he sights Giles, but recovers his stride quickly.

“Can I help you?” Bernie’s smile might have emerged from beneath Giles’ brushstrokes, as perfect and false as any advertisement mockup. He’s already moving to block Giles from the reception area, out the door with the other discarded relics swept out nightly by the agency’s fleet of janitors.

He looks haggard, Giles decides. Bernie’s once wore his age better than Giles—an abundance of money will cushion one from the worst ravages of time, to a point—but perhaps their fortunes have reversed. A comfortable life is no substitute for divine intervention. “Can’t an old friend stop in to say hello? It’s a lovely day outside, and I was in the area.”

It’s as bleak outside as it has been every other day this week, but it least it isn’t hailing as Bernie maneuvers him unceremoniously out the door. “What do you _want_?”

There was a time when Giles approached Bernie with an air of deference. In the dissolution of business partnerships, in romantic breakups, there is always a winner and loser, and Giles is all too acutely aware of which one he was. But that was before. He has been touched by divinity, and, more tangibly still, by Dimitri, and he is determined to at least be as brave as his friends.

So he lays it out—OCCAM, Zelda, Duane, Fleming, Hoyt, leaving out the most incriminating bits. The need for Bernie’s numerous media contacts to find their way to the standoff. There is a story, and in telling it sympathetically, its protagonists may have a chance of winning. The oldest story, pens against swords, and Giles _knows_ that Bernie knows the right people to tell it. After all, what is advertising but a game of competing truths?

“You owe me.” He can already see Bernie’s mouth shaping into an objection. “Not as a business partner. As someone who once loved me.” 

He has no idea if it’s true, if Bernie is capable of love, if he was, back then. What does the word even mean, when he has seen the sort of love that brings the dead back to life, transformed? Bernie shifts from one foot to another, a child caught in a lie. 

He’s guilty, Giles decides. He expects to feel some catharsis, but the place where his feelings about Bernie once lived is as smoothed over and numb as an old scar. He can’t even summon pity.

“You look good,” Bernie says, at last. “You must be getting laid.”

“Fuck you,” Giles replies. The words feel satisfying, full and rich in his mouth.

Bernie is old, defeated. He has surrendered, first to the world’s demands, and now to Giles. “I’ll make some phone calls.”

 

* * *

 

The draft from the window is getting worse. Much of the year, Giles appreciates the light it lets in, the cracks in the dilapidated walls that remind him of France in his youth, but less than two weeks into the new year, the apartment’s single aging radiator isn’t enough to keep winter from its unending assault. He shifts so that as much of his skin is touching as much of Dimitri’s skin as possible while the cats pace back and forward over the lumps their bodies make in the blankets.

Dimitri, who is still here, placated by his reassurances that the OCCAM Sit-In will buy them time, and Bernie will buy them exposure. Giles can sense his restlessness. Even lying in Giles’ arms, listening to one of his rarer Chopin recordings, he is constantly moving, his fingers tapping along on the sheets to the flight of notes on the record, or his foot twitching, or tossing over from one side to another, mumbling something about the pain. Nothing Giles does seems to quiet him, and he braces himself for what is bound to be another restless night.

Just as Dimitri finally seems to be settling down, the phone rings. It’s so unexpected that his exhausted brain barely registers the noise; it’s been months since anyone phoned him, and who could possibly be calling at this hour? Murmuring apologies, he slides out from the bed, and, shivering, his feet icy against the floorboards, stumbles to the telephone.

Shouts and crashes travel through the tinny wire; he can only just barely make out Zelda’s voice.

He remembers Dimitri stressing the telephone protocol in the strictest possible terms. “You shouldn’t be calling!”

“Giles, they’re here,” she says. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Who’s there?” But he knows, of course he knows. Negroes aren’t permitted to protest buses or the counter at Woolworth’s; the occupation of a government aerospace facility was always bound to bring down hell on earth. The only surprise is that they waited so long.

“The army,” Zelda says. There’s a distant smash, like a demolition, or a car crash, or a gunshot. “They’re breaking down the doors.”

And then the line goes dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1 “What shall I do with this body they gave me,” Osip Mandelstam (1909)


	18. The Eagle Flies On Friday

_The telephone ring is as unexpected now, in the present, as it is in Giles’ story. It’s an unfamiliar, piercing sound, as invasive to your ears as a gunshot. How can they live like this, with this shrill interruption that might come at any point, turning an ordinary day into tragedy? But it explains much about humans, the way they survive by walking a blade-thin line of exhilaration and terror._

_Dimitri picks up the phone, leans it between his shoulder and scarred cheek. “Yes, this is—well, it is good to hear your voice as well. No, not_ quite _yet.” He listens. You can hear his breathing, expectant, relieved. Another person to share the grief and uncertainty. You can hear Giles’ breathing, labored. If you listen very carefully, you can even hear the rush of words spoken over the telephone line, though you can only guess at the content._

_“But still,” Dimitri says. “You should come here. If you can. He would like to see you, and…there is someone else...” His dark eyes flicker towards you. It is little use to tell him that you are an open secret as far as those he fears are concerned; a man who has lived the kind of life he has can no more break himself of paranoid habits than you can exist comfortably on land. It doesn’t escape your notice that he’s armed, that decades from the last time anyone tried to kill him, and even though you have no reason to be afraid, he hasn’t stopped looking over his shoulder._

_He hangs up. “She’s upstate,” he says, to Giles, then to you: “A book tour. She can be here by tonight.”_

_It’s as though he expects this jumble of words to mean something to you, who has known only_ upstream _and_ now _and the movement of hands through water_. _You catch what isn’t said. Zelda is on her way, Zelda is putting her life and her plans on hold, because if she doesn’t, she’ll miss the moment where her closest friend takes his last breath._

_And Dimitri, his fingers moving over the beige surface of the device, the tremor almost imperceptible, but not to your eyes. Zelda’s call has made that inevitable moment real for him in a way that it was not before._

_But of course, all things end._

 

* * *

 

The siege of OCCAM begins with a cacophony of sound and fury that ruptures the frozen night. The receiving area doors explode inwards with a force that seems to lift up the whole wing of the building and shake it, and the troops flood in, shouting and swinging batons. Zelda sees Lou go down immediately, blood spraying from his nose and mouth and pouring down the side of his face.

It’s the Arch Social Club all over again. She has steeled herself for this eventuality, planned for it. She runs, just like she’s supposed to. She reaches Strickland’s office. Calls Giles. In the terror of the moment, she forgets all the codes she carefully rehearsed with Dimitri and just blurts out that the army is here.

Downstairs, she sees Antonio and a few of the other men shoving overturned tables into a makeshift barricade that they ram up against the broken door. She can’t see Duane anywhere. The old Zelda, the one who’d scolded Elisa for daring to love and risk her life for her creature, would have hidden under the desk and calmly submitted to arrest when they came for her. But that woman is as dead as her marriage to Brewster. She hangs up the phone and fumbles around frantically for anything that can be used as a weapon. Coming away with nothing, she at last seizes the steel-boned chair, its seat and back padded in sleek, modern teal, and drags it after her as she clumps downstairs.

 

* * *

 

Giles is in motion immediately, pulling on his trousers, casting around for his hat and coat.

Dimitri, still in his undershirt and boxers, shuffles to the easel. He has set something up, one of the papers from Strickland’s office pinned beside a piece of stationary and a hand-scrawled note.

“I understand that inspiration may strike at the most inconvenient of times,” Giles says. “But—right now?”

“Right now,” Dimitri snaps. “I am working out an alternative course of action.”

Giles isn’t convinced that they had a plan to begin with, and says as much. Dimitri grimaces. “You take over. You are better at this than I am.”

He’s panicked enough not to question the command, and takes Dimitri’s place as the other man pulls on his clothing. He even starts reading the sheets of paper fixed to the easel before the words coalesce into meaning.

“What is this, Dimitri?”

“Just write.” He adjusts the collar of his shirt. Swipes one of Giles’ ties. He straightens, checking his appearance in the mirror. “And quickly. We need to leave.”

“We.” Must he always be a step behind? Dimitri is leaning on his cane, expectant. “You’re staying here. Where it’s safe.” He’s not even sure what he can accomplish by rushing to the scene, but he can hardly refuse Zelda’s plea for help.

Dimitri watches him, his face transformed into something cruel and implacable by the scarring. There is a monster that lives behind those soft, sad eyes, and he remembers that before he knew Dimitri as a friend, as a fellow intellectual, as a lover who wanted only to lie quietly in someone’s arms and read poetry on long rainy afternoons—before all of that, Giles knew him as a murderer.

“Forgive me if I’m unwilling to let _you_ go without a fight,” Dimitri says. “I am coming with you.”

“If I say no, you’re just going to follow me on foot, aren’t you?”

Dimitri nods. “You would not put an injured man through that.”

“Then I suppose we had better get moving.”

 

* * *

 

Zelda catches a glimpse of Duane from the end of the corridor, ushering two frightened women into a storage closet. She catches his eye as she drags the chair across the cement; he quickly shuts the door behind them, a finger pressed to his lips as he seals them in, and runs to her. 

“You should hide in there too,” he says.

“Not a chance.”

A crooked grin. “Guess not. C’mon, some of the guys are holing up in the cafeteria. Be harder for them army goons to get past.”

Zelda clutches his arm. “Duane, it’s over. You didn’t see what they did to Lou, they stomped all over him…how long you think we got until that’s us?”

“Until morning. Until the news cameras come, and show how we’re willin’ to get our heads bashed in for just a few more cents on a paycheck. Until the world sees, and maybe then they’ll do something.”

She can hear some kerfuffle or another somewhere. The barricade down in receiving won’t hold up under a prolonged assault, assuming they don’t just break down another door. “White folks been watchin’ black folks get their heads bashed in since this great nation was founded,” Zelda tells him. “What’s gonna be so different this time?”

Duane winks, leaning down to peck her cheek. “Maybe this time, we win.”

 

* * *

 

Giles’ van weaves through the blocks surrounding OCCAM, steering clear of the army trucks, the police cars, the metal barricades. All this for a handful of striking janitors? But they must be fighting back; he sees two men dragged out in handcuffs, but most of the soldiers are milling around, and the doors on almost every side are still holding. 

In the passenger seat, Dimitri shivers, drowning inside Giles’ warmest coat. What he thinks he can do to help Zelda and the others in his condition, Giles has no idea.

Then again, isn’t he in much the same position?

“There,” Dimitri says, pointing to the front entrance. There’s a huddle of protestors encamped on a patch of snow with placards and candles that keep blowing out. “They can be a distraction. Stir them up, get them asking questions of the soldiers.”

“Won’t someone recognize you?”

“I know other ways inside.” He takes a few steadying breaths. In the blue haze before dawn, his face is a wan, cratered moon wreathed in shadow. “Trust me, Giles.”

Giles stops the van on a side street, his hands shaking so badly that he can barely parallel park. His body should have become accustomed to its constant heightened state of panic, but instead the shocks come in sequence, each one as startling as the last. He could die. They both could. This may be the last time he sees the man he has come to love.

“We could still run,” Giles says. His voice is as thin and pitiful as the protestors’ flames, the barest echo of the man who looked away from the suffering on his television screen until his hand was forced. “Go somewhere no one knows us, somewhere you’ll be safe.”

Dimitri half-smiles. “Zelda and Duane saved my life,” he replies. “And neither of us are cowards, not where it matters. But even still—this is why I came here, why I became an intelligence agent when I could have stayed in Moscow, sealed in a laboratory. To make a better world. As they are trying to do, inside. Why live at all, if not for that?”

Giles bends across the seat and kisses him hard. Dimitri’s lips are dry, This is worth it, he tells himself. Dimitri believes it, so why can’t he?

He ought to say something. _I love you_ , or _please stay safe,_ or _even if we both die, you’ll still be the best thing that ever happened to me,_ but last words fail him. He clutches Dimitri’s hands so tightly that the bones strain against his fingertips, presses their foreheads together and feels the flutter of Dimitri’s eyelashes against his cheekbone.

He is stepping out of the van, running, through the snow, towards the gleam of candlelight, before he can change his mind.

 

* * *

 

They’ve cut the power. In the darkness, a single flashlight and a few emergency candles render the windowless cafeteria an alien landscape, light flickering across steel counters and pans, turning to glittering stars reflected in the eyes of OCCAM’s last defenders. The chair Zelda dragged from Strickland’s office is wedged under the door handle, and one of her hands clutches a frying pan while the other grips Duane’s for dear life. 

She can’t tell if it’s dawn yet. If anything is happening outside. Time has slowed, stopped, been compressed to nothing more than the space between heartbeats. She can see her own breath, frosting in front of her, and that’s how she knows she’s still alive.

Someone’s singing, too quiet to alert the soldiers to their presence, and she wants to join in, knows the song from church, but her voice doesn’t cooperate. She can’t even see the faces of her fellow strikers; only Lucille, with her pale skin and hair, is bright enough to stand out in the shadows, only Duane, whose callused hand she grips, is familiar enough by touch to know in the darkness. Who remains at their side, and who has been arrested or defected to the MPs, who is hiding in cupboards and closets across the building, she can only guess. She listens to the small, human noises that the others make as they wait, murmurs and sighs and farts and coughs. Stripped of race, of gender, of the myriad flaws and virtues that made her love or hate them, she feels an odd, amorphous kinship, a fragile thread weaving her to them, and them to her.

Then the door bursts open, and everything is bright and sharp and loud. Her arm is jerked backwards, nearly out of its socket, as one of the men tackles Duane to the ground. She grabs for him, flails wildly with the pan, but a nightstick collides with her stomach, knocking the wind out of her. She crumples, cheek to the cold floor, close enough to hear the crunch of a boot into Duane’s ribcage, the speck of white from a tooth flying out of his mouth. She screams, and she’s roughly yanked to her feet, kicking and twisting, arms wrenched behind her back.

She remembers Hoyt’s admonition to go quietly, but no, all around her, friends and strangers she’s worked beside, fought beside, are on the ground, she can still see Duane, his handsome face a bloody pulp, and if she gives in now, if she doesn’t struggle to the very last, she might as well already be dead. She squirms in an attempt to face her captor when something dark and heavy smashes into the side of his head.

Yolanda drops the frying pan to grab her hand.

“ _Run_.”

Zelda starts to argue, but the other woman is possessed with an inhuman strength, hauling both of them through the shattered doors and down the hallway. A safe distance away from the fighting, they pause to catch their breath.

“What about the others?”

“You wanna help them? Then come with me.”

“I thought you hated me.”

Yolanda narrows her eyes. “You the closest thing to a leader we got left standing. C’mon.” She slings one arm around Zelda’s shoulders. “They all waiting to talk to you, girl.”

Her entire body one gigantic bruise, leaning heavily into Yolanda, Zelda follows the other woman out the front doors, the rays of an orange dawn sparkling on freshly fallen snow. The adjustment from OCCAM’s lightless halls to the bright light of day burns her eyes. She can barely make out Fleming, shielded by a cluster of MPs. Some of the protestors, their ranks now bolstered by a somber contingent of black men and women in their Sunday best. Separating the two groups, keeping the peace, is a news crew.

Giles, the brim of his hat pulled low over his face, is standing right beside him. Just like at the docks, the night they lost Elisa, he’s the only thing grounding her to the world. They hold each other, an oasis of stillness amid all the chaos.

“Giles, they got Duane,” she whispers.

“I know. These people, the journalists, and—” She guesses the well-dressed folks are Duane’s people, those outside organizers that she’s only caught glimpse of. “We’ll follow them to the station. See if we can’t get everyone they arrested released.”

She’s not even sure if Duane’s _alive,_ the way he’d looked when Yolanda had rescued her. She doesn’t say it out loud, though. Instead, “Why’re they all just standing around?”

Giles frowns. “It seems like they’re waiting to hear your side of the story.”

These are people who know their place, their purpose. Professionals, serious white folks with earnest expressions, important enough that the military lets them be there—albeit behind the barricade—permits them to talk to the two bruised and bloodied women who’d staggered out of OCCAM’s doors. And Duane’s friends, the very ones who’d put him in her path, for whom OCCAM was just one battlefield among many.

All of them, waiting to hear from _her._

She squeezes Yolanda’s hand, and together, they walk towards the crowd. It’s only when she’s almost there that she thinks to wonder where Dimitri is.

 

* * *

 

The staircase up to Strickland’s office is taller and steeper than Dimitri remembered, and each step tugs painfully at his scars. He’s gasping for air by the time he reaches the top, sweat beading at his hairline despite the cold. It hurts. He was certain he had overcome the worst of the pain during his long convalescence, but he’s overreached again, and the sheer effort of the climb brings pinpricks of tears to his eyes.

The office is as much a ghost as Strickland himself. The glass overlooking the laboratory is shatterproof, but several of the television monitors are smashed, the files looted, the important research, the world-altering plans, all burned or stolen. The part of him that still remains an objective scientist mourns the loss of all that data, those years of mental and physical labor, that striving to understand, and learn, and conquer the unknown—even as he knows that it would never have been used to improve the welfare of humanity.

He eases himself into Strickland’s chair, and waits. He doesn’t need to wait very long.

Hoyt, surrounded by armed MPs, strides past the office and does a double-take as he catches sight of Dimitri sitting in his chair. He says something that, behind the soundproofed glass, Dimitri can’t make out, and motions the other men to continue their sweep without him.

“Dr. Hoffstetler.” Hoyt lets himself in, pauses in the doorway, as if he expects Dimitri to stand at attention and salute. Dimitri taps his cane, a placating gesture to exonerate both of them. “I can’t say I expected to see you back here. Rumor has it you died. Or defected to the Reds.” He makes it clear which the more distasteful option is. Hoyt walks around the desk to clap him on the shoulder—the injured one. The piercing shock of pain that splinters down his arm is an echo of Strickland’s Alabama Howdy-do, and it’s all he can do to suppress the scream that wants to tear free from his lungs.

 _Never mind,_ he tells himself. He’s been tortured before. He can get through this.

“Well, son,” Hoyt says. Avuncular, but he makes no attempt to disguise the menace beneath his words. Strickland was afraid of him, Strickland, whose hatred is marked indelibly on Dimitri’s body and psyche. “It’s good to see you still among the living. But what _are_ you doing here? Don’t tell me you had something to do with this unpleasantness.”

“It comes as much of a surprise to me as it does to you, General Hoyt. Still. I hope they won’t be unduly punished.”

“This commie rabble? We’ve rounded them all up. They’ll fry for treason. Why the _fuck_ are you here, Hoffstetler?”

Dimitri reaches into the drawer where he knows Strickland kept his bottle of good Scotch. Miraculously, it’s untouched, despite the general plundering of research; either no one knew, or the strikers had more important concerns. He suspects the former—they’re human, after all. He pours them each a glass.

Hoyt looks suspicious. Dimitri huffs and takes a quick, calculated swig from one of the glasses. Just a little movement of his tongue, a whisper of pressure from his remaining teeth. He feels the capsule crack. Holds the glass to his lips a moment longer to deliver his poisoned kiss, then, having demonstrated its safety, slides it across the table as if amused by the other man’s paranoia. “This debacle, it is a failure for this organization. To have a state-of-the-art research facility brought to its knees by cooks and janitors…Please, drink, General.” He raises the second, untouched glass. “To an old friend. Col. Richard Strickland.”

At last, Hoyt takes a drink, echoing Dimitri’s earlier careful sip. It _is_ very good Scotch. He’ll give Strickland credit for taste.

“Richard was right about you.”

“He was. Though I cannot take credit for all of this.” He eyes the cigarette case in the breast pocket of Hoyt’s uniform. “I believe your janitors might be better heirs to the Revolution than my masters back in Moscow.”

“Traitors and ingrates,” Hoyt growls, “When it comes time, I’ll ask to throw the switch myself.”

“Something tells me,” Dimitri replies, “that there will be much larger problems than an unruly labor force soon enough.” He watches the level of liquid in Hoyt’s glass. “I advised the strikers to burn any record of their employment, down to the punch cards. A mob of nameless, transient workers, shouting about wages and conditions—this is an embarrassment best shoved under the carpet. Merely a sideshow, compared to, say, the apparent suicide of a five-star general in his office following the leak of classified documents to the press.”

Hoyt’s face is flushed. He must be feeling the symptoms now—disorientation, difficulty breathing. In training, they told him that death takes no longer than three minutes; Dimitri thinks that a year, a century, must have passed. Maybe the capsule hadn’t broken properly to release the poison, maybe it wasn’t a large enough dose. Maybe Dimitri was delusional to believe that a tiny pill meant to kill a man like him would be enough to slay a monster.

“They are not,” he adds. “Commie rabble. They didn’t need me to make an uprising. I’m sad to say that I think they are idealists. They believe that, given hard work, justice will prevail. What could be more American than that?”

There’s definite reddening around the skin. “Good Lord, Hoffstetler,” Hoyt grits out, “do you ever stop talking?”

“You and I,” Dimitri says. “We are empiricists. We know that ideals alone cannot accomplish what must be done. For that it takes a less moral man than any of the strikers you have in custody.”

Dimitri slides the note across the table. Hoyt should have, if he calculated correctly, time enough to read his own confession, a sordid catalogue of leaks and missteps that paint him as a far greater threat to US peace and security than a handful of strikers. It may not be enough to free them, but at least it can raise enough doubt to save their leadership from the electric chair.

“What is this?” Hoyt’s voice is choked. Curious. Dimitri has never actually watched the process, though he’s had it explained to him in gruesome detail. The general looks sideways at the dregs of liquid. “You drank out of this glass too.”

“Certainly.” Without thinking, he probes the cavity in his back tooth with his tongue, where the cyanide capsule had sat, an unexploded grenade, for a decade, until he’d carefully slid it free.

“And the note?”

“I have a friend who is very good at forgery.” He pushes himself up with the desk as a support, reaching for his cane. “You know,” he says. “I genuinely did like working here. It saved my life, in a manner of speaking. Showed me miracles. But you would have corrupted all of that wonder. I don’t think you could have helped it. And if I cannot put an end to your plans, at the very least, I will stand in your way.”

The general is almost purple now, his throat seizing. He kicks at the desk until his chair tips over and he thrashes on the ground, choking, tugging at the starched collar of his uniform. Dimitri hears someone call the all-clear down below; the strike has been subdued, the building secured. Time to go. There are quieter exits, and he can only hope that Giles has managed to adequately direct the media towards the cause of the strikers, and away from his escape.

He pauses to take a cigarette from the corpse’s pocket. His first in months, he breathes in the smoke, the warmth filling his lungs and soothing his nerves and dampening the pain of his wounds. Ironic, the scale of sabotage and assassination he has managed without Moscow’s sanction. He wonders if they’d approve, or even understand.

Dimitri Antonovich Mosenkov limps back down the stairs, leaving behind OCCAM, and Dr. Robert Hoffstetler, forever.


	19. You Are Longing And What Stills It

_The tale, in its telling, has carried on well into the evening. You wonder if should you have demanded so much from a dying man. He is insubstantial, flaking to dry ash before your eyes. Belatedly, you raise both your hands in apology, but Giles shakes his head._

_“I’m almost finished,” he says. “It would be a shame to stop now.”_

_You see Dimitri flinch at this; he walks to the record player to as the current music yields to static. He thumbs through the stack of vinyl that he, or someone else, has brought to fill the gaps where there is nothing left to be said._

_“At any rate,” Giles continues, “that was where Bernie’s contacts came in useful after all. It was much more expedient to quietly release the arrested strikers than to try them under the harsh light of media scrutiny. With no desire to draw attention to security leaks, occupations, or General Hoyt’s mysterious demise, the paperwork and bodies were conveniently lost in the transfer from military custody to the local jailhouse._

_“Though for the OCCAM strikers, the story was not quite over yet.”_

 

* * *

 

“Fired?” Zelda is too exhausted to summon the correct amount of outrage. Forty-eight hours after the strike was crushed, they’re back in Elisa’s apartment, reviewing the terms of Fleming’s unofficial offer.

Duane shrugs, then winces, and there it is, a fresh new burst of anger to send a jolt of adrenaline through her veins. His face is a swollen wreck of blackened welts and butterfly sutures. He shouldn’t be out of the hospital, but even with so many eyes watching, she’s paranoid enough to believe that he’s safer at home. She tells herself that she and Giles managed to keep Dimitri alive, and he’d been in far worse shape than Duane is now.

“Just a few.” He sounds like he’s speaking through a mouthful of marbles. There’s cotton wadding where some of his teeth used to be. “The ringleaders.”

“You and me.”

“We knew the risks.” He moves slowly, stiff as an old man, but his hand, where it covers hers, is warm and strong. “And everyone else gets to go back, with the raise we asked for. Equal pay for whites and Negroes. Women too. Coulda been a lot worse.”

“Yeah?” Zelda leans her head into his shoulder. “Well, _I_ didn’t ringlead nothing. Some of us got rent to pay.” She sighs, too relieved that he’s alive, and with her, that they’re all still here after the nightmarish raid, to be truly incensed. “Ten years I gave that place. And for what?” 

“You impressed the hell out of the organizers from CORE,” Duane says. “They want us to go back to Chicago with them. They’re working on a new campaign, say they could use a few more hands.” He threads his fingers through hers. “That means you, too. If you’re willing.”

Zelda thought she was finished with crying forever, but no, here come the sobs again, hitching in her throat, sending an echo of pain through her bruised ribs. She touches the side of his poor, battered face. “How many teeth you got left to get knocked out, Duane?”

“Promise you’ll at least think about it,” he says.

All she can think is how far Chicago is from the Atlantic Ocean. Whether, without her, Giles will still stand at the docks and wait for Elisa.

“I’ll think about it,” Zelda says.

 

* * *

 

After Giles and Zelda, accompanied by a reporter and several of Duane’s organizer friends, march down to the police station and demand—albeit with shaking voices—freedom for the arrestees, after Duane is released from hospital, Giles refuses, for hours, to let any of his friends out of his sight. Zelda eventually pleads a need for rest and long showers and privacy, and so Giles retires to his own apartment with Dimitri, who, in all the chaos, had barely said a word on the drive home.

Giles is gripped by an urgent need to touch him, to join their flawed, failing, aging bodies until he can’t tell where he ends and the other man begins, so determined is he to prove to himself that they have survived yet again, that what he has left, his friends, his lover, his cats, his freedom, the crumbling apartment on Elmwood that folds the remainder of his life inside its walls, is not some feverish dying dream.

Afterwards, he and Dimitri lie face to face in his bed, barely making contact, both quiet as death. The cats, for once, give them their space. Outside the window, the sun makes its presence known through a blanket of grey, and the light outlines the ridges of scar tissue along the side of his face, the once alien landscape rendered familiar. Home.

It’s a shame to ruin the moment with the very conversation they’ve danced around. There are loose ends—Giles is still coward enough to want to leave it that way, to not question the steel glint he’d seen in Dimitri’s eyes when he’d returned to the van. That they were allowed to escape with their lives, he convinces himself, is answer enough. But he can’t avoid this forever. 

“What is keeping you here?” It is Dimitri who says it aloud at first, Dimitri, who cannot help but be the braver of the two.

The truth is, Giles has no career, no clients, just dwindling savings that won’t cover the rent for much longer, and Zelda and Duane have prospects elsewhere, and even if they didn’t, they’ve accumulated enough baggage in the city that it’s not surprising they’d want to move on.

Nothing he can say is enough of an excuse. Inertia, force of habit. A dead woman’s memory. His conviction, wild and unfounded though it might be, that his faithfulness will be rewarded. A promise, unspoken, that lies under the surface of the frozen canal.

“What if I only saw what I wanted to, that night?”

It is unfair to burden Dimitri—who had, after all, been lying alone and bleeding out at the time—with the question. But who else? He’s so fucking tired; he wants to give up the responsibility for his life to someone else, just for a while. 

Dimitri says, “I would think that an artist would cope with uncertainty better than a scientist.” Giles, about to protest that the opposite is the case, is silenced by a finger pressed against his lips. “You have the strongest heart of anyone I have ever met. I trust it, more than I trust my own intellect.”

“That’s not an answer.” 

“If they lived—” Dimitri puts less emphasis on the first word than he could have. He may be a killer, but he has never been unkind. “—they would be very far from here by now.” He closes his fingers around Giles’. “There’s a whole world out there. And a very long coastline.”

 

* * *

 

_“I gave Mr. Arzoumanian two months’ notice. Would you believe that the man actually wept? By then, the world had shifted under our feet yet again; less than a week after the OCCAM strike was violently ended, President Kennedy signed an executive order allowing government workers to unionize. We packed everything that would fit into the van and left the rest behind. I had only two cat carriers; Dimitri ended up with Lilly in his lap for most of the drive._

_“It’s one thing to uproot yourself in your twenties, your thirties, even your forties. But to leave everything in your life behind in your sixties, under the shadow of sabotage, treason, and murder, in the company of a Soviet spy, and with nowhere in particular to go? The only thing more foolhardy than that would have been to stay._

_“It was worse for Zelda, living in the remnants of Elisa’s life. She took what she could carry of her old friend, her favorite books, a pair of her shoes. We divided the records between us. It felt like a second death, saying goodbye to that place._

_“And then we went down to the docks, to say it out loud.”_

* * *

 

None of them, as Duane points out, are actually _from_ Baltimore.

Each had somehow found their way to the city, rootless and bereft, and by some strange happenstance, eventually found each other. Only Elisa, found by the river, raised in Our Lady of Sorrows, returned, at last, to the water, had lived an entire life encompassed in its borders. 

They stand on the pier, gazing out towards the water, the thin band of red where sky meets ocean, between the grey hulks of factories, the dots of headlights off the expressway. Zelda is praying for a sign, from God, or the Asset, or Elisa, from anyone. There is no one to tell her she’s doing the right thing, or the wrong one, and the freedom of it all is overwhelming.

They leave offerings on the dock. A hardboiled egg, a scarlet pump, the twin of the one Dimitri left outside of OCCAM. A charcoal drawing, already beginning to dampen with the first raindrops. A hair ribbon, running over the concrete like a stream of blood.

“Give them some space,” Dimitri murmurs to Duane, and the two retreat to the van, leaving her alone with Giles. They lean into each other.

“I’m only ever gonna be a phone call away,” she says. “And when things settle down—” She laughs at the absurdity of her own statement; the whole world seems on the brink of some terrible madness, and even now, she knows it’s only getting started, that much worse will come soon enough.

“Of course,” Giles says.

“You gonna be okay?”

“I could ask the same of you. Maybe. Eventually. It feels wrong to be okay, when—” 

“I know,” she says, the stab of losing, even if only temporarily, the one person who truly understands her loss is a fresh and unexpected pain. They grip hands.

It’s dark, and the storm clouds are settling in. She can feel the changing pressure in her skull, in her bones. Through vision blurry with fatigue, with tears, she watches the lights skate across the surface of the water, the white and orange speckles of traffic, the steady yellow of the streetlights.

And farther out, as far as the curvature of the Earth allows, a distant bioluminescent blue. She might be imagining it, as she might imagine the swish of a fin, the wreath of black hair billowing above a pale face, the way she might imagine a happier ending.

Giles squeezes her hand, and she thinks then again, maybe she’s not imagining it at all.

 

* * *

 

_“Was it them?”_

_You barely hear the question, so weak has his voice become, and regardless, you don’t know the answer. But your own story begins soon after, your very existence tangible proof. Still, you would like to believe that your parents returned, braved the danger of the shore, to give closure to the friends that had loved them._

_Much later on, of course, they sent you._

_Giles tells you that the song playing is Schubert’s “Du bist die Ruh.” Gentle music to leave the world._

_“Tell Elisa,” Giles says, “that we lived a good life. All of us. I think that’s what she wanted to know.” He coughs again, adds: “I think…it’s almost time.”_

_At this, Dimitri turns, his expression unreadable, and runs out the door._


	20. Dreamers With Empty Hands

_It’s well after dark when Zelda and Duane arrive, just as you trace Dimitri’s steps to where he slumps against the cinderblock wall of the stairwell. You have reconstructed their presence from photographs, from your mother’s stories and Giles’. They are both older than you’d imagined, rumpled and creased from a long drive, but they have aged gracefully, still possessed of the passion that has made them both minor icons of a battle that shifted terrain more than ended. They are strangers, whom you have loved long before ever meeting them._

_Zelda rushes to Dimitri first, throwing her arms around him, rubbing his back. Her hair is worn natural now, shot through with grey. She wears a neatly tailored coral dress that suggests a bygone glamorous era, and while she commands a speaking fee these days, you remember your mother telling you that she would labor for hours to copy the dresses she saw in magazine. You wonder if this one was a product of the same effort._

_Duane, for his part, looks you up and down. “Well, shit,” he says. “They weren’t making it up, were they?” He reaches out to you, and it takes you a moment to realize that he wants to shake your hand, and him a moment to realize that you might not recognize the gesture._

_“He is upstairs,” Dimitri says. “Seventh floor.”_

_Duane pats his arm gently, and Zelda murmurs, “Oh, honey.”_

_You stand apart from them, an outsider despite your tenuous connection. You have caught glimpses of them over the years, when the ocean currents aligned with their visits to New York. But this grief is something private, almost shameful to witness._

_“Can you stay with him?” Dimitri asks, finally. “I—I can’t breathe in there.”_

_Duane nods. He’s still watching you, fascinated. Zelda guides him away, towards the stairs, taking a second to meet Dimitri’s eyes. “You’ll come back with us, won’t you? After?”_

_He doesn’t answer, and they accept it. He waits for them to leave. So accustomed are you to water that it takes you some time to notice that he is softly weeping._

_“The story he told you didn’t end there,” he says, once the tears subside. “Would you believe, I am older now than Giles was when we first met. We had almost three decades together, and then…” Dimitri shifts from one leg to another, wincing. “But they were good years. That much is true. Zelda and Duane went to Chicago, and kept fighting, and eventually, Zelda started writing. First the stories of the movement, the people in it. She marched on Washington, shook hands with Dr. King just before his assassination. And letters; back then the telephone wasn’t always safe, but we were determined to keep in touch, even though Giles and I never kept an address for long._

_“We travelled up and down the coast until there wasn’t money to keep the van running. Always stopping, looking out to the ocean at night. Drawing the waves, just like he had after losing Elisa, but this time he wasn’t alone. He taught me sign language, and I taught him Russian, and we had nothing but each other._

_“It was pure chance that we landed in New York City as the 60s erupted into protest and psychedelia. He had old friends there, and we were broke and desperate. He did not think that, years after the art world had passed him by, he would find an audience for his mermaids among the hippies and dropouts, but there it was. For the first time in a decade, he was selling paintings again, though he kept the first mermaid, the one with Elisa’s face. He made a living of sorts, and I as well, at a used bookstore run by an entirely new brand of Communists than the ones I’d known back home.”_

_You are not completely sheltered from the affairs of humans. You know that walls have fallen, curtains torn. The boundaries between your world and his—though the former remains a secret to all but a small number of humans—have blurred as well. You have emerged from the ocean to find a different balance of power than the one your father found; you were sent, or you sent yourself, to repair the relationship between species. The relationship between countries too, has changed, the hostilities that nearly ended your parents’ lives, and Dimitri’s at long last abated._

_After so many years of exile, Dimitri can finally go home._

_He shakes his head. “My home is gone,” he says. “What the Nazis didn’t destroy, Stalin conquered, and neglect consumed. What would be left for me there, after all this time?” His fingers twitch, and he reaches into his jacket pocket with the nervous manner of a man about to transgress. A cigarette. It takes him two tries to light it. He is out of practice. “I managed two books, under a pseudonym. Countless research papers. Even quit smoking, for a while.”_

_There is no ventilation in the stairwell, and what little of your skin is exposed bristles and prickles at Dimitri’s exhale of smoke. He coughs and doubles over. You recognize the signs of pain and fatigue, despite the biological differences between your species, the strain at the corners of his mouth, the shadows under his eyes. He offers a self-deprecating smile as he sinks into the staircase, one arm wrapped across his stomach even as he takes a long drag of his cigarette._

_“All this rain doesn’t help,” he says. “Nor does age.”_

_You fold, your body unsuited to the hard angles of human architecture, to sit on the stairs beside him. In your world, wounded creatures heal quickly, or they die. There is little room in between._

_Slowly, you reach out to cup one hand over his shoulder. He stiffens, but watches in fascination as a bioluminescent glow shimmers across your metacarpals. You are not your father, a god to these frail, mayfly beings, capable of breathing life back into a broken human body. But still, you feel his ragged breathing ease, slightly when you touch his shoulder, more dramatically when you cover the scar on his abdomen that, thirty years later, still takes its toll. His body is soft and vulnerable. You could gut him with a flick of your claws; it is a marvel that it was his species, and not yours, that eventually triumphed in some primordial Darwinian struggle. He watches in fascination, asking you questions that you yourself have barely begun to answer, absorbed more by the mechanics of your abilities than its effects, the dominant traits passed on through your father, your capabilities for survival on land, what mammalian characteristics you might possess._

_He only pulls away when you start to touch his cheek, and even then, he does so apologetically. “I have lived with this face for three decades,” Dimitri says. “I do not know how Giles could have fallen in love with me despite it, but I wish it to be the last thing he sees.”_

_You expect more sobbing, but he did not survive under such adversity for so long without acquiring armor. He finishes his cigarette. Adjusts his glasses. You can see him testing out the new parameters under which he can breathe, move, the borders of the physical expanded outwards. For a moment, you see in him the glimmer of idealism that threw him, again and again, into the unknown. “We are in a hospital,” he says. “The marvels of which you are capable, that your parents—you could save everyone here. Maybe, with time,_ everyone. _”_

_You let your silence speak for you, and your hands do not move. He understands your meaning well enough._

_“That isn’t why you’re here,” he acknowledges. “We have to save ourselves.” When he stands up again, his movement is more fluid, unhampered by pain. “We went to the coast every November, hoping to get a glimpse of them. Zelda and Duane came with us, when they could get away from organizing. It was years until you came, years where we thought we all might have collectively hallucinated, that my initial assumption was correct, and both Elisa and the Asset had died that night. Strange to think this is the first time I will be waiting alone.” He looks up at the staircase, no longer an onerous journey, physically, at least. “Giles was right,” he says. “We were happy, all four of us. It is pure avarice to want more time. But I have always been too greedy to be a good Communist, and every breath I’ve taken has been wrestled, violently and against all probability, from death and entropy.”_

_With that, he clumps back up the stairs, and you only follow him belatedly._

* * *

 

_You are an intruder on a strange vigil, Zelda and Dimitri, on opposite sides of the bed, each holding one of the old man’s paper-white hands, Duane, though no longer the young firebrand of Giles’ stories, standing fierce guard over all of them._

_Giles’ breathing is less strained, but shallower, as if he has accepted the end of his fight. It is barely audible beneath the music, between Dimitri’s dry, ironic recitation:_

“I, a latrine cleaner

                         and water carrier,

by the revolution

                         mobilized and drafted,

went off to the front

                             from the aristocratic gardens

of poetry -

               the capricious wench

She planted a delicious garden,

the daughter,

                 cottage,

                           pond

                                 and meadow.”1

 

_He stops when you enter, and you can feel all sets of eyes on you, all but Giles, confident as he is in his faith, and consumed as he is with the business of dying. Would another day, another year, make so much of a difference?_

_You cannot say. Your parents left the world of men for reasons as particular to them as were your reasons for joining it. You can only guess at what they might want from you._

_Your hand, placed above the dying man’s heart, alights in ripples of blue. Another day then, or another year, a blink of your own gold-flecked eye. It will have to be enough; you are not without your own responsibilities, and the ocean, patient though it is, awaits your return like a jealous lover, when you might at last strip off your mechanical carapace and swim, sleek and free, to its depths._

* * *

 

_Epilogue  
November, 1992_

For all that Giles loves New York, it is as bleak as Baltimore was in November, and he feels the chill in his ancient bones. This time of year, at night, the sandy beach south of the boulevard is nearly deserted, frost-crusted, and crunches under his shoes as, supported by Dimitri on one side and Zelda on the other, he makes his way to the rocky outcrop that spears into the Atlantic Ocean. No part of the city is ever truly empty, but a wintery night on the beach draws few spectators.

It is too cold a night for an elderly man who, weeks ago, was dying in a hospital, and his friends have made every possible argument to dissuade him. But each of them has been, in one way or another, transformed by the creature brought into OCCAM in a cylindrical coffin, and however their lives have diverged and drawn together since, they have lived in the echoes and spaces left by his last plunge into these same dark waters.

Dimitri is as cheerful as Giles has seen him in nearly a year, interrogating Zelda about her latest book, debating the future of labor organizing without the Soviets to keep the American capitalists in check with Duane. He says that their visitor has offered him a research position of some sort with the obscure government agency that employs him—(“The irony! Can you _imagine_?”)—but Giles can tell that he is tempted by the opportunity to step out from the shadows and publish under his real name again. Giles observes his friends and lover as if from a distance. How little they have changed, despite time and distance, though now it is he who must lean on Dimitri, he for whom the specter of the end is never far away.

He doesn’t know how much time their visitor’s intervention has bought him. Even now, the conversation singing around him, he can feel the cold hand of time tugging at his sleeve, and he wonders whether there will be another November, another vigil spent watching the tides, and waiting for her. 

Giles acquiesces to sitting on the edge of a post, Brighton Beach a distant glimmer at his back. Dimitri slides one arm over his shoulder. Beside them, Duane and Zelda stand, hand-in-hand, the dusk smoothing out their wrinkled skin, sculpting them back into the faces he sees when he thinks back to those violent, glorious days.

The waves toss, crash foam against the rocks. In the failing light, a fin, a sheen of scale, the promise of an old friend.

He has seen the ocean from every angle, become as familiar with its contours and moods as with his own face and deemed it less of a mercurial stranger than his reflection in the mirror. And yet, he knows, water is the most capricious of elements, a liquid that refuses to obey the rules of liquid, hiding secrets and miracles in its expanse.

Giles feels their presence more than his cataract-glazed vision can perceive them, water shifted and displaced by the movement of bodies beneath it.

“Is that—” Zelda starts, and falls immediately to silence, none of them daring to disturb the moment. He can’t answer, certain that his heart might burst if it is, that it would surely stop altogether if it is not.

Instead, he reaches for Zelda’s hand, for Dimitri’s. His nation of four has stood, for all these years, beyond the borders and ideologies that sought to destroy it. He will cling to it, to them, and they to him, for whatever beautiful, ephemeral days he has left, as they all wait together for Elisa and her monster to breach the surface.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1 [Vladimir Mayakovsky, “At the Top of My Voice” (1930).](https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/mayakovsky/1930/at-top-my-voice.htm)
> 
>  
> 
> Here it is—another story that I thought would be a quick one-off that no one would read and somehow turned into a massive sprawl. I've been pretty overwhelmed by the reaction, and I hope the ending didn't disappoint. Thank you all so much for sticking with this thing.
> 
>  
> 
> Dedicated to my comrades in CUPE 3903, currently in their thirteenth week of the strike that *may* have inspired a certain plot line. I'd hoped to be able to report victory by the time I finished writing this, but I know it will come eventually. <3


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